turbulence.org (100 unread)

Peace! … I want you to know about new work. Your insight and any references you suggest I explore, are invaluable to my process of planning and actualization. Thank you in advance.

Krewe Coumbite is a sonic instrument of study in Black and Indigenous Diasporas ecology and vernacular rhythms documented from 1940s til current. The work focuses specifically on vernacular of cultural musings expressed in: noise, chants, stories, lullabies, narratives around naming, Cultural sayings/proverbs/recipes, and in working-class rituals such as public transit, migration, service work, and in community gatherings.

Startup support/funding for the work comes in partnership with Turbulence.org to create an interactive web portal. And with Harvestworks to research, document, and archive this idea of Black Sound. Some conceptual elements i am including are: GIS mapping, audiovisual gaming, algorithmic patterns, literary worldbuilding, sound remixing, and live performance.

Your Help…

My aim with this work is to produce a signature sound that carries the resonance of Black and Indigenous transcontinental movement and activism. Using the oral/aural algorithms of “passing it on” and “repetition is the mother of learning” as tools. I’m working with both original sound recordings, and stuff i’ve scavenged from the internet of sound produced from public marches, rallies, speeches, and viral videos. With remixing, I want this work to embody the cultural wisdoms of the Indigenous and Black Diasporas. Of particular interest to me are the articulations of Black and Brown working class individuals, community groups, and multi dialect/multi lingual freedom fighters.

Who should i talk with?

What archives(public & private) should i visit?

Are there historical and contemporary sonic nuances you feel must be included to contextualize th Black Sound and/or Cultural Wisdom?

Thank You!

Muthi Reed

Black is not a color. Black is an attitude — James Brown.

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe. The term “world building” appeared as early as 1965 in science fiction criticism, and is used in relation to science-fiction or fantasy stories and games. The resulting world may be called a constructed world. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. Worldbuilding often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world. Constructed worlds can enrich the backstory and history of fictional works, and it is not uncommon for authors to revise their constructed worlds while completing its associated work. Constructed worlds can be created for personal amusement and mental exercise, or for specific creative endeavors such as novels, video games, or role-playing games.

An informal definition for Algorithm could be “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.”

[Nuevas Especies XXI / Andrea Juan] The Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country with Technarte and Culture Program of the National Direction of the Antarctic launch a call for a scholarship Art Residency in Antarctica with the aim of developing an artistic project with a direct vinculation to the Antarctic Continent and technology.

Art in Antarctic is a culture programme with 10 years experience with the aim of spreading, from the most diverse artistic disciplines, the findings of scientific research, and make visible the need to take responsibility for the Antarctic heritage and environment of our planet.

The research conducted by scientists at the National Direction of the Antarctic and the Argentine Antarctic Institute, concerning the appearance of methane hydrochloride on the surface of glacial ice and the evidence of global warming on the Antarctic Peninsula and the disappearance of Larsen Ice Shelf, were the starting point for the foundation of the art project that investigates the effects of climate change on the Antarctic Peninsula.

This was the starting point for the Culture Programme of the National Direction of the Antarctic, to which international artists started to join, working from the aesthetic research in several disciplines, combining art and science and generating a reflexive consciousness in the dissemination of works referred to Antarctica.

Through an agreement between the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, Technarte and National Direction of the Antarctic bases have been established for the participation of a student of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the call for Residence for Artists planned for the months of October and / or November 2015.

Thus, after the selection of the winning project, selected by a board composed of representatives of the three organizations, the student and artist will travel to Antarctica to develop his work in the Argentine Antarctic Basis of Marambio, Esperanza or Carlini. The length of residence in Antarctica will be between 20 and 40 days, taking into account possible climatic changes in an extreme environment, although unique for its inspiring character.

The theme of the projects must be directly related to the preservation of the environment and human interaction in the Antarctic territory, showing a significant respect for the environment. The selected art project must have a strong technology and / or scientific component. Besides traveling to Antarctica to develop the project, student and selected artist will have the opportunity to present his/her work in Technarte 2016, the International Conference on Art and Technology that takes place annually in Bilbao, and participation in future exhibitions related to the program Art in Antarctica.

The HYBRID CITY 3: Data to the People — Conference, Workshops and Parallel Events :: September 17-19, 2015 :: University of Athens, Athens, Greece. Call for Papers: Deadline for Abstracts: March 15, 2015.

Hybrid City is an international biennial event dedicated to exploring the emergent character of the city and the potential transformative shift of the urban condition, as a result of ongoing developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and of their integration in the urban physical context. It aims to promote dialogue and knowledge exchange among experts drawn from academia, as well as researchers, artists, designers, advocates, stakeholders and decision makers, actively involved in addressing questions on the nature of the technologically mediated urban activity and experience. The second installment of the Hybrid City, that took place in 2013 boasted seven keynote speakers, sixty-eight paper presentations and diverse parallel events, that were documented in the printed volume of proceedings.

Hybrid City Conference 2015 in Athens, Greece will consist of three days of paper presentations, panel discussions, workshops and satellite events, under the theme “Data to the People”. The events are organized by the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC), in collaboration with New Technologies Laboratory, of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, of the University of Athens. The main venue of the conference is the central, historic building of the University of Athens, while workshops, projects’ presentations and parallel events will take place in other University venues and collaborating centers and institutions, in the center of Athens.

The 2015 theme: Data to the People

So far in the 21st century, we have experienced a multifaceted crisis that’s challenging the current structural paradigm at a global scale. This crisis is not only economic; it is also social, political and environmental. As such, it has a very prominent urban dimension, exposing cities to a diverse spectrum of distress. Acute natural disasters -earthquakes, fires, or phenomena related to climate change; floods, severe snowfall, fires etc. – precarious access to basic resources such as food and water, lack of opportunities for employment, inefficient social services, e.g. healthcare and education, along with ever increasing unforeseeable acts of violence -a complex and manifold phenomenon on its own right- render living in urban areas vulnerable.

The third Hybrid City Conference seeks to investigate Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) as means of supporting more Sustainable Cities and Resilient, Self-Reliant Communities and for empowering Citizens. By proclaiming “Data to the People” the Hybrid City Conference adopts a citizen centered approach and seeks to highlight bottom-up projects and initiatives and processes of technological mediation, which assist individuals, communities and cities in responding and adapting to challenges. The Hybrid City Conference aims to offer insights into the complexity of factors that weaken the city fabric and affect urban wellbeing. Furthermore, it aims to investigate the potential of ICTs to support proactive and collective design towards future cities, focusing on real needs and away from a smart-everything rhetoric.

Hybrid City cordially invites papers both employing a theoretical and/or a practical approach that present concepts, case studies, projects, works of art and best practices promoting the discussion on the theme. Emphasizing the inherently interdisciplinary nature of technologically mediated urban activity, we welcome proposals discussing concepts or documenting projects of urban innovation, that through originality contribute to shaping the future of the hybrid city and offer useful insights to the hybridization process of the urban environment.

Submissions may critically examine the following topics, or suggest other relevant lines of research within the Hybrid City context:

. Environmental sensing and the Internet of things: regaining control
. Open urban data, capturing and visualization
. Environmental perception, cognition, immersion and presence in the context of hybrid urban spaces
. Psychosocial perspectives into the impact of locative and pervasive media use
. Placemaking, place attachment and place identity in the hybrid city
. New public spaces: From creative spatial re-use to urban farming
. Peer to peer urbanism: From open source to doing it with others
. Collaborative economies and sharing cities practices
. Urban self-reliance: Alternative collectives and support networks
. Resilience and sustainability: Emerging citizen-driven toolkits, methodologies and prototypes
. Artworks, and urban interventions for citizen empowerment
. Transmedia location-aware storytelling
. Performative bodies, gendered spaces and technofeminism in the Hybrid City
. Infrastructural fails and alternative communication systems: Critical perspectives and responses to stacktivism
. Autonomous, offline file-sharing and communication networks
. Open hardware and sustainability

All abstracts will undergo a double, blind peer review. Selected authors will be asked to submit a full paper (8 pages), or short paper (4 pages) to be included in the printed conference proceedings. Further details will be announced right after the notification of acceptance.

The HYBRID CITY 3: Data to the People — Conference, Workshops and Parallel Events :: September 17-19, 2015 :: University of Athens, Athens, Greece. Call for Papers: Deadline for Abstracts: March 15, 2015.

Hybrid City is an international biennial event dedicated to exploring the emergent character of the city and the potential transformative shift of the urban condition, as a result of ongoing developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and of their integration in the urban physical context. It aims to promote dialogue and knowledge exchange among experts drawn from academia, as well as researchers, artists, designers, advocates, stakeholders and decision makers, actively involved in addressing questions on the nature of the technologically mediated urban activity and experience. The second installment of the Hybrid City, that took place in 2013 boasted seven keynote speakers, sixty-eight paper presentations and diverse parallel events, that were documented in the printed volume of proceedings.

Hybrid City Conference 2015 in Athens, Greece will consist of three days of paper presentations, panel discussions, workshops and satellite events, under the theme “Data to the People”. The events are organized by the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC), in collaboration with New Technologies Laboratory, of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, of the University of Athens. The main venue of the conference is the central, historic building of the University of Athens, while workshops, projects’ presentations and parallel events will take place in other University venues and collaborating centers and institutions, in the center of Athens.

The 2015 theme: Data to the People

So far in the 21st century, we have experienced a multifaceted crisis that’s challenging the current structural paradigm at a global scale. This crisis is not only economic; it is also social, political and environmental. As such, it has a very prominent urban dimension, exposing cities to a diverse spectrum of distress. Acute natural disasters -earthquakes, fires, or phenomena related to climate change; floods, severe snowfall, fires etc. - precarious access to basic resources such as food and water, lack of opportunities for employment, inefficient social services, e.g. healthcare and education, along with ever increasing unforeseeable acts of violence -a complex and manifold phenomenon on its own right- render living in urban areas vulnerable.

The third Hybrid City Conference seeks to investigate Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) as means of supporting more Sustainable Cities and Resilient, Self-Reliant Communities and for empowering Citizens. By proclaiming “Data to the People” the Hybrid City Conference adopts a citizen centered approach and seeks to highlight bottom-up projects and initiatives and processes of technological mediation, which assist individuals, communities and cities in responding and adapting to challenges. The Hybrid City Conference aims to offer insights into the complexity of factors that weaken the city fabric and affect urban wellbeing. Furthermore, it aims to investigate the potential of ICTs to support proactive and collective design towards future cities, focusing on real needs and away from a smart-everything rhetoric.

Hybrid City cordially invites papers both employing a theoretical and/or a practical approach that present concepts, case studies, projects, works of art and best practices promoting the discussion on the theme. Emphasizing the inherently interdisciplinary nature of technologically mediated urban activity, we welcome proposals discussing concepts or documenting projects of urban innovation, that through originality contribute to shaping the future of the hybrid city and offer useful insights to the hybridization process of the urban environment.

Submissions may critically examine the following topics, or suggest other relevant lines of research within the Hybrid City context:

. Environmental sensing and the Internet of things: regaining control
. Open urban data, capturing and visualization
. Environmental perception, cognition, immersion and presence in the context of hybrid urban spaces
. Psychosocial perspectives into the impact of locative and pervasive media use
. Placemaking, place attachment and place identity in the hybrid city
. New public spaces: From creative spatial re-use to urban farming
. Peer to peer urbanism: From open source to doing it with others
. Collaborative economies and sharing cities practices
. Urban self-reliance: Alternative collectives and support networks
. Resilience and sustainability: Emerging citizen-driven toolkits, methodologies and prototypes
. Artworks, and urban interventions for citizen empowerment
. Transmedia location-aware storytelling
. Performative bodies, gendered spaces and technofeminism in the Hybrid City
. Infrastructural fails and alternative communication systems: Critical perspectives and responses to stacktivism
. Autonomous, offline file-sharing and communication networks
. Open hardware and sustainability

All abstracts will undergo a double, blind peer review. Selected authors will be asked to submit a full paper (8 pages), or short paper (4 pages) to be included in the printed conference proceedings. Further details will be announced right after the notification of acceptance.

“Perception, in whatever sensory modality, is the result of the brain’s cartographic skill.” Antonio Dimasio

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) invites you to propose a hybrid net art project for Turbulence.org – Augment it Yourself (AiY). Projects must use both the World Wide Web and a physical site :: Deadline: July 1, 2014 :: Commission Amount: $6,000 :: Commission Date: July 2015.

The behavior of all particles is contingent on the presence of a conscious observer.

Our internal and external perceptions are inextricably connected.

Reality is the perpetual enfolding/unfolding of autopoiesis (self-making), in relationship with others and our environment.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a real-time experience of a real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input — such as video, graphics or sound — and mapped to GPS coordinates. Thus, after downloading an AR ‘app’ to a smartphone and going to the specified location, users are able to experience intertwined realities.

While AR refers to the technologies that make these experiences possible, we are interested in how we have always augmented our realities — with our brains and other reality-mediating technologies — modifying and/or enhancing reality by layering memories on real-time perceptions, for instance. How will your project contribute to perception, memory, and the creation of the autobiographical self?

Email them to turbulence @ turbulence.org with the Subject: Turbulence.org – AiY Proposal.

* Do it Yourself (DiY) empowers individuals to make things without the aid of “experts” or professionals; it is an alternative to consumer culture’s emphasis on relying on others to satisfy ones needs.

“Perception, in whatever sensory modality, is the result of the brain’s cartographic skill.” Antonio Dimasio

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) invites you to propose a hybrid net art project for Turbulence.org – Augment it Yourself (AiY). Projects must use both the World Wide Web and a physical site :: Deadline: July 1, 2014 :: Commission Amount: $6,000 :: Commission Date: July 2015.

The behavior of all particles is contingent on the presence of a conscious observer.

Our internal and external perceptions are inextricably connected.

Reality is the perpetual enfolding/unfolding of autopoiesis (self-making), in relationship with others and our environment.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a real-time experience of a real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input — such as video, graphics or sound — and mapped to GPS coordinates. Thus, after downloading an AR ‘app’ to a smartphone and going to the specified location, users are able to experience intertwined realities.

While AR refers to the technologies that make these experiences possible, we are interested in how we have always augmented our realities — with our brains and other reality-mediating technologies — modifying and/or enhancing reality by layering memories on real-time perceptions, for instance. How will your project contribute to perception, memory, and the creation of the autobiographical self?

Email them to turbulence @ turbulence.org with the Subject: Turbulence.org – AiY Proposal.

* Do it Yourself (DiY) empowers individuals to make things without the aid of “experts” or professionals; it is an alternative to consumer culture’s emphasis on relying on others to satisfy ones needs.

“In the book, I argue that interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways in which we experience embodiment as per-formed, relational, and emergent. I provide many in-depth case studies of contemporary artworks that develop a practice of embodied philosophy, setting a stage to explore how we inter-act and relate with the world. I offer a critical framework for analyzing interactive artworks and what’s at stake in our encounters with them, which can be applied to a wide range of complex and emerging art forms. Here bodies, matter, and their matters, are implicated as always unfolding and enfolded to make what is. At stake is the rehearsal of that making, the ways we perform our bodies, media, concepts, and materials.” Continue >>

Nathaniel Stern is an Associate Professor of Art and Design in Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and a Research Associate at the Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.

Eyebeam is pleased to announce the Open(Art) exhibition and workshop series, which marks the culmination of our Open(Art) Fellows’ projects.

Open(Art) is a joint initiative launched by Eyebeam and Mozilla to support creativity at the intersection of art and the open web. It offers a unique opportunity for artists and technologists to collaborate on work that catalyzes participation on a global scale, and engages audiences through innovation, transparency, and utility.

Join the Open(Art) Fellows — Forrest Oliphant, Toby Schachman, and Nortd Labs — for a reception on July 12 and workshops on July 13.

Meemoo brings the power of app development to everyone. It is an HTML5 data flow programming environment with an emphasis on real-time audio-visual manipulation. Using an intuitive visual interface that lets users connect modules together using colorful “wires,” Meemoo lets anyone remix and build apps right in the browser.

Pixel Shaders is an interactive book, platform, and community centered around harnessing the graphics processing unit (GPU) for artistic purposes. It aims to make GPU programming accessible to artists in the same way that tools like Processing made CPU programming more acessible to digital creators.

BOMfu is a collaborative web repository for open hardware projects. It aims to increase the ease of use and quality for the “bill of materials” or “BOM” – the list of raw materials required to build a finished product. The goal is to open up new and more complex forms of open hardware creations.

Eyebeam will host a Workshop Day on July 13th, during which the Fellows will present their projects, explain their implications, and teach participants how to use them.

Forrest Oliphant’s Meemoo workshop is designed for K-12 art, media, and technology educators who might use Meemoo within the classroom.

Toby Schachman’s Pixel Shaders workshop will teach the basic of “shader” programming, which are programs that run on the GPU to create real-time visual effects. No prior programming experience required.

Nortd Lab’s BOMfu workshop will introduce participants to open hardware “BOMs” — or bills of material — and get users started finding open source projects and creating their own.

The Helmholtz Initiative on Synthetic Biology is calling for proposals for art exhibits developed during an experimental laboratory experience.

The project is a common project between Prof. Dr. Roland Eils (DKFZ Heidelberg and Heidelberg University) and Prof. Ursula Damm (Bauhaus University Weimar). The jury will consist equally of scientists and artists.

With the emergence of Synthetic Biology, a scientific discipline aiming at the standardization of biological parts for the targeted generation of organisms with new, naturally not occurring features is gaining more and more scientific as well as public attention. Discoveries and inventions in the field of Synthetic Biology bear an enormous potential for the understanding of the living world and the development of processes and products for medicine and technology. The societal changes originating from such advances, however, are neither anticipated nor reflected in scientific approaches to this issue. Thus, the project aims at introducing artists to the technical methodology of Synthetic Biology and to uncover common aspects for a critical assessment of societal and cultural aspects of this emerging discipline.

The project starts at September 9, 2013. Selected artists are invited to a four-week experimental laboratory visit at the BioQuant Center for Quantitative Analysis of Molecular and Cellular Biosystems in Heidelberg, Germany. During the first two weeks, the embedded artists will be introduced to experimental techniques, such as handling of bacteria and mammalian cells, DNA cloning and protein expression as well as analytic methods, such as microscopy, gel electrophoresis or photometric assays.

The following two weeks are dedicated to the first stages of exhibit development. The exhibits generated during and after this laboratory experience will be presented to the public in an exhibition in the award-winning BioQuant Center in Heidelberg. The exhibition will last (depending on the kind of exhibits) 4-6 weeks and will take place within the framework of the international research symposium Synthetic Biology — from understanding to application — taking place at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg on December 9-11, 2013.

The call is open until July 28, 2013. Applicants will be informed about the Jury‚s decision until August 7, 2013. Accommodation in Heidelberg from September 9 until October 4, 2013, as well as equipment and consumables necessary for the experimental part are fully covered by the organizers. Two artists will be supported with a budget between 1.000 – 3.000 (depending on the requirements) to cover production costs of the exhibits.

A walking event that reconsiders the radical politics of Thoreau in our time. Connect observation, environmental awareness, aesthetic action, and social change to the climate crisis now. We will walk from Walden Pond to Brister’s Hill, home of one of the first freed slaves in Concord and symbol of Concord’s engagement with the abolitionist movement. As we walk we will consider what is nature, what is changing, and what is radicalism today?

This event is part of WORK OUT, an outdoor exhibition of the work of Futurefarmers, Fritz Haeg, Jane D. Marsching, and Andi Sutton who have each created alternative, sustainable engagements with the landscape in deCordova’s Sculpture Park. Through October 6 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, MA.

Field Station, Marsching’s project for WORK OUT, is a platform for data collection, citizen science, handmade and digital explorations of plant and animal life, and a conversation full of questions about the vibrancy of matter and our role in the stresses and resiliences of ecosystems.

Digital and new media artists utilize innovations in locative media, tracking technologies, telecommunication networks, and novel computer interfaces to craft artworks that create new ways to connect with the city. Just as their predecessors transformed urban neighborhoods, such as New York’s SoHo and Chelsea, through their energy and imagination, today’s artists are altering our perceptions of, and relationships with, urban space though their digital inventions and interventions. Thus, it is the purpose of this symposium, art exhibition, and scholarly volume to formally appraise the ways new media and digital artists engage urban ecology. It seeks to gather together contributions from artists, architects, computer scientists, designers, urban planners, social scientists, critical theorists, and others to consider these new modes of seeing, representing, and connecting within the urban setting.

There are three possible ways to participate:

1. Symposium. Propose an oral presentation, dialog, panel, or other form of audience engagement for the symposium. Topics can range from reviews of how technology supports digital artistic practice to social studies of how a group or community is engaged by the work of digital and new media artists – and everything in between.

The proposal should be approximately 300 words in length, include a very short list of important references, the names and affiliations of the presenters, along with a brief bio of each. Papers related to all accepted presentations will be considered for the edited scholarly volume (see below).

2. Edited Scholarly Volume. The goal of the scholarly volume is to define and contextualize the ways new media and digital artists engage the urban environment and its population. It seeks chapter proposals that describe theories, applications, analyses, case studies, reviews, histories, and manifestos that include, but art not limited to:

Artistic and design practices for the urban setting

Artist, designer, scientist, technologist collaborations

Artistic creations and practice based on scientific/technological models and simulations

How digital artistic practice engages communities within the urban setting

Technological advances supporting urban art

User interfaces supporting urban art

As with the symposium proposal, a chapter proposal should be approximately 300 words in length,include a very short list of important references, the names and affiliations of the presenters, along with a brief bio of each. It is anticipated that the scholarly volume will be published by a major international publisher.

3. Art Exhibition. Artists are invited to submit artwork related to the symposium theme for display either within the Pace Digital Gallery or through its website. Artists should submit a short proposal describing their artwork, a brief biography, and the URL of their websites. All artwork in the show will be documented in the show’s catalog.

All proposals for symposia presentations, book chapters, artwork, and any other inquiries should be emailed to:

Artist, coders, poets, and engineers are invited to apply for a six week artist residency in the virtual environment / game space of Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox where creativity and ludology intersect in a highly social space rich with possibilities due to relative openness of the code and hosting options.

Ars Virtua is soliciting proposals for its Artist-in-Residence program (AVAIR). Established and emerging artists are invited to participate. The residency will culminate in an exhibition and opening in Minecraft and documentation in Minecraft and on the web. Depending on the nature of the exhibition a downloadable “world” may also be made available. Residents will also receive a $400 stipend, training and mentorship as necessary.

AVAIR is an extended performance that examines what it means to reside in a place that has no physical location. The purpose of the residency is to reflect on the nature of the game environment and terrestrial world in the context of contemporary art. NO Previous experience in virtual environments or Minecraft is necessary.

Ars Virtua is keenly aware of the power of virtual worlds. The arts continue to shape our understanding of technologies, this residency targets both gamespaces and virtual environments as a place for emergent art, performance art, coded art and social experimentation. It is the purpose of this residency to give direct attention to the interrogation of the space, place, and metaphor. Residents will be encouraged to explore, experiment with and challenge traditional conventions of art making and distribution, value and the art market, artist and audience, space and place, data and reality.

The residency will take place in Orwell on our semi-private server and in our building space. Potential residents are encouraged to visit beforehand.

Application Process:

Artists are encouraged to become familiar with Minecraft before applying. Be aware that there is a limited free trial, and that finalists will be contacted for an in world interview, if you do not have an account at that time one will be provided. Applications will be judged based on ideas presented and work previously executed. We are looking for an artist who is willing to work within what may be a new environment for them and be prepared to evolve in response to the malleable world that is Minecraft.

To apply send the following information to avair-at-arsvirtua.com:

1) Name, address, phone number, email address.
2) A brief statement about what interests you about Minecraft or what you might like to explore.
3) Link to an online portfolio (expect a 5 minute visit). If you do not have an online portfolio please briefly discuss your work.
4) one page proposal. Note that the proposal is NOT a commitment, but expresses your interest.

Applications are due on or before March 21, please send any inquiries or additional questions to avair-at-arsvirtua.com.

About to embark on its 33rd year, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. — an independent not-for-profit organization founded in New York City — continues to commission networked art for its world-renowned website Turbulence.org (1996-): its over 220 works span a crucial 16-year period of exploration and innovation in digital networked environments, ranging from hypertext to data visualization, blogs to social networks, and interactive dance/musical compositions to 3-D architecture and iPhone apps.

L-Carrier, by Eli Keszler, was installed and performed at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, and Chris Mann’sPublic Works was performed at Issue Project Room.

Launching in 2013 are:

“Nothing You’ve Done” by Jason Nelson; “iSKY-TV” by iKatun; “Constellations over Playas” by Joe Moore; “Mark-It” by Esmerelda Kosmatopolous; “Submersible” by Yotam Mann; and “Valley of the Deer” by Jillian Mcdonald.

Andy Deck and Zannah Marsh will participate in a panel discussion about artistic uses of participatory media at Harvestworks. And Peter Traub will exhibit “WoodEar” at Pace Digital Gallery.

Please help us keep doing what we’re doing by making a donation via PayPal on [turbulence.org] or by sending a check to:

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.
124 Bourne Street
Roslindale, MA 02131
United States of America

Yono Pixel-Art Jam/Hangout Online with Ed Stastny: I’d like to invite you to come hangout with us Sunday (October 21) while we doodle and code. I’ll specifically be focused on facilitating Yono participation (taking reservations, editing data, uploading pieces) and making Yono pieces, but you can do your own thing or just pop in to say hi. If it’s anything like past Yono hangouts, there’ll be a lot of screen-sharing and pixel-pushing. And that’s fine with me.

I set it up for afternoon (PST) so our European friends can potentially join in.

All you have to do is RSVP yes/maybe to this and be on Google+ at the time and I’ll invite you in to the hangout. If you see me on then and don’t have an invite, just send me a message.

For those planning to get in on the Yono action, you might want to check out [sito.org] and find an [OPEN] slot to reserve. Hell, pick two. You can just respond to this thread with your requests and I’ll do my best to get you into the dataclump before we start.

The Association for Public Art in Philadelphia (aPA, formerly the Fairmount Park Art Association) presents the world premiere of Open Air by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Open Air is a spectacular interactive light experience directed by participants’ voices and GPS locations, illuminating the night sky from Philadelphia’s historic Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Inspired by the city’s rich tradition of democracy and respect for free speech, Open Air was created specifically for Philadelphia and for participation by the general public. Using a free mobile app developed by Lozano-Hemmer’s studio, participants are invited to record and submit messages of up to 30 seconds in length-shout-outs, poems, songs, rants, dedications, proposals.

In response, 24 powerful robotic searchlights, stationed strategically along a half-mile section of the Parkway, will create a unique, dynamic light formation in the sky. The lights will respond in brightness and position to the GPS location of the participants and the frequency and amplitude of their voice recording, which can be heard through the app, the project website or public speakers located at the Project Information Center at Eakins Oval (24th Street and the Parkway). The free ‘Open Air Philly’ app will be available from the iTunes store starting Sept. 20.

Priority will be given to those submitting messages from the Parkway, but for those not onsite, the project website, www.openairphilly.net, will allow users to record messages that will be archived and played back by the lights if other web visitors rate them highly. All participants will have a personalized webpage created automatically with their message, comments and images of the light sculptures that their voice created.

The messages with the highest ratings online will be featured during the opening night celebration, a free public event that will take place September 20, 7:30–11pm, on the closed inner drive of the Parkway. The evening will host a selection of local food trucks, a live countdown and ceremonial lighting, a presentation by Lozano-Hemmer, voice performers and other special guests.

Depending on atmospheric conditions, Open Air will be seen up to 10 miles away from the Parkway each evening from 8 to 11pm. The Project Information Center will be equipped with app download, free mobile loan stations and seating areas for watching the lights and listening to the messages. There will also be an Information Outpost located at Sister Cities Park (18th Street and Logan Square).

‘This project is meant to be a new public space for Philadelphians to express themselves,’ says Lozano-Hemmer, who is globally acclaimed for his large-scale interactive art experiences, including the well-known 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics installation Vectorial Elevation. Thousands of individuals will be able to participate onsite during the project’s duration, and hundreds of thousands more will experience the project online and as viewers. Lozano-Hemmer’s interest ‘is to create intimacy and not intimidation. While the project will be spectacular in scale, what matters to me is that individual participants can personalize their city with their contributions.’

The project is presented in conjunction with the 2012 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and the 2012 DesignPhiladelphia Festival and supported in part by the Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Concurrent with Open Air, Lozano-Hemmer will present the exhibition Voice Array, Sept. 6–Oct. 13, at New York City’s bitforms gallery.

On Sunday the whole world is invited to join a globally synchronised choreography. By following the instructions on a smartphone, a dance routine is performed. A dance to be experienced alone, together. As a distributed worldwide flashmob. While standing anywhere on earth, moving your phone above your head from left to right, someone standing somewhere else, will do the exact same thing, at that exact moment.

With the rapid growth of the use of mobile pocketsize digital technology, our environment of today consists of more than just physical tangible material. There’s a data-reality invisibly surrounding us with virtual games to be played, stories to be experienced, treasures to be searched for. Using “augmented reality viewers” people are uncovering virtual manifestations around them, appearing on the live camera view of their mobile phone.

While doing so, they make quirky movements, waving their smartphones in the air in search of virtual content. These moves resemble an improvisational choreography. It triggered Dutch new media artist Sander Veenhof to turn the phenomenon into a real choreography. The project is the result of a cooperation with choreographer Marjolein Vogels.

A virtual instruction cube floats around a participant. The cube can be viewed using the augmented reality app “Layar”. While keeping ones’ feet at the indicated position, the cube instructs a person to hold the phone with specific hands while following the moves of the cube. The moves are initiated in a synchronised way across the globe because the system is controlled from one central source.

The current choreography consists of 33 moves, designed specifically for persons holding a smartphone in either left or right or both hands. The series of movements of the cube, moving back and forth, from left to right, up and down, from closeby to far away, are chosen in such a way that the movements of the hand(s) and thereby the body becomes a structured dance.

ARTISTS

Sander Veenhof studied “unstable media” at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Being an adept of digital and virtual realities and fascinated by the intrinsic lack of impossibilities of these domains, Veenhof now pursues his fascination throughout the physical realm thanks to Augmented Reality which has turned the world into a programmable environment. With his creations for our geographically-connected data-reality, he explores the practical and conceptual opportunities for artistic expression within the new hybrid semi-digital space. He is joined in these efforts by the Augmented Reality artist collective Manifest.AR, which he co- founded after the full-scale uninvited AR exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York he organized with fellow members of the group.

Marjolein Vogels works as a performer with NB projects, Jack Gallagher en Jennifer Tee. Besides this, she creates her own choreographies which are presented at various theatre festivals, performed by the collective The Magic Life Club. She is the organiser and curater of the yearly WhyNot festival.

CONTEXT

The launch of the Global Choreography will be presented at the Tempo Festival Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. A projection at “Oi Futuro” will show the Dance.AR participants across the earth, both as dots on a Google map or through live video-streaming, wherever streams are generated.

The development of computational tools and media has been radically transforming the landscape for the practice of design, the arts and numerous cultural manifestations. Recognizing this, xCoAx is designed as a multi-disciplinary and nomadic enquiry on arts, computers, computation, communication and the elusive x factor that connects them all.

xCoAx is a forum for the exchange of ideas and the discovery of new and profitable synergies. It is an event exploring the frontiers of digital arts with the participation of a diverse confluence of computer scientists, media practitioners and theoreticians, that will focus on the relations between what can and cannot be computed, what can and cannot be communicated, what is beautiful and how humans and computational systems intersect in the development of new directions in aesthetics.

Day one: Conference and keynote. All presentations will be selected by double-blind peer-review by an international and multidisciplinary scientific committee. Presentations will be organized in panels chaired by a moderator that will sum up the presentations and lead a discussion with the authors and audience. A guest keynote will close the day.

Day two: Demos, poster presentations, exhibition and performances. All demos and posters will be exhibited at various spaces in and around the conference room and the cloisters of UniBG Sant’Agostino. Presentations and discussion will be organized throughout the afternoon, networking authors and audience. During the evening, performances will be presented at Bergamo’s Piazza Vecchia, the central location of the Bergamo Città Alta.

The Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) research project invites scholars, artists, researchers and performers to the conference, Remediating the Social. The conference programme consists of expert presentations, across a range of disciplines and modes of inquiry, addressing examples of creative communities that have formed around various practices, media and discourses. Case studies, papers and panels, discussing examples arising from the ELMCIP project and other contexts will be presented. The conference will be e-cast, allowing for remote attendees to freely monitor events and put questions to conference via Twitter. Conference proceedings, with a full colour catalogue of commissioned art works, will be published prior to the event.

Remediating the Social is hosted by Edinburgh College of Art in collaboration with New Media Scotland and University College Falmouth within the framework of the ELMCIP research project. The event is held at Inspace, a purpose-built research and exhibition facility at the University of Edinburgh, fully instrumented to facilitate engagement with developments in new technologies, scientific research and creative practice. The exhibition will continue after the conference for three weeks..

ELMCIP is supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Commission FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.

Since the internet entered the public domain in the early 90’s there has been an explosion in artistic interest in its use as a means, site and context for creative practice. Much of this practice is performative in nature; either originating from a performance background and using the internet as a new site and/or augmenting aspect of that practice or is a form of practice developed as direct response to the internet and becomes performative to some degree in its spectatorship.

It has been well established that the internet is not the first or only example of the use of a networked technology repurposed for creative practice. There is a clear time line that can be traced back through the practice of Roy Ascott and his coining of the term Telematic Art in the 1980’s to artist’s use of satellite networks, telephone and other telecommunication devices as each were invented. Seen in this respect the internet can be considered as one of many networked technologies that has enabled networked performance.

The internet is unique however in that it is not a singular network type that favours a particular form of media, broadcast or spectatorship. Most famously known as the network of networks it enables multiple protocols of which the world wide web’s http is just one, is multimedia in nature and encourages intertextual folding and layering of media, is multi-directional not simply a broadcast communication form, de-centralised in ownership and the majority of its technologies are openly accessible.

Remote Encounters, a two-day international conference with performance evening, aims to explore the use of networks as a means to enhance or create a wide variety of performance arts. How do networks as a site for performance provide opportunities for us as artists and performers? In particular how can we remotely collaborate, merge geographically separate places and times, reconfigure the space of performance and the relationship between artist and audience?

:: Call for papers and performances ::

Contributions are invited from practitioners and academics for papers and performances that contextualise current networked performance themes and issues both historically and across the spectrum of different types of networks, explore the wealth of performance opportunities offered by the internet and give a sample of future directions for networked performance.

New sites, new narratives, new genre:
- Networks as new sites of opportunism;
- Networked spaces as new territories;
- Transmedia storytelling, new narratives;
- Mixed reality narratives;
- Personal and private spaces as public venue;
- First, second and third person narratives;
- Intertextuality;

The relationship between artist and audience:
- Primary and secondary audiences, local and global;
- Audience as performer;
- Interactive performances and breaking down the fourth wall;
- The transformation of audience to user;
- Strategies and levels of engagement;
- The network as a means for converging and collaborative practice.

Tools and technologies:
- Democratisation of form and presentation;
- Subverting networked communication media;
- Alternative and community based networks;
- Tubes and streams, from public access television to webcasting;
- Virtual worlds and video gaming;
- Social networking as performance;
- Pervasive and locative performance;
- Physical interfaces and feedback;
- Telephony and SMS messaging.

We are particularly interested in live performance proposals, existing or new, that employ OpenSim and as such could take advantage of a large space provided by the organisers.

For further details and an informal chat contact Garrett Lynch (glynch[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk) or Inga Burrows (iburrows[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk)

:: Submissions ::

Deadline: 4pm (GMT), Friday 31/08/12

Proposals are now being accepted for paper presentations and live performances delivered both at the venue and remotely. Your proposal should take the form of an OpenOffice (.odf), Word (.doc), .pdf or .rtf document only.

Proposals for papers should include the following:

- An abstract (500 words maximum including bibliography);
- A short bio (200 words maximum);
- Full name and full contact details;
- State whether your proposal is for participation on site or remotely.

Proposal for performances should include the following:

- A description of the work (500 words maximum);
- Accompanying media that may include video, images or sound to give us an idea of the proposed work provided online or on CD/DVD;
- A short bio (200 words maximum) with examples of previous works provided online or on CD/DVD;
- Artist(s) / group / performer(s) name and full contact details;
- A full list of required equipment. Note that where possible we will provide equipment however the event will host several performances so highly complex configurations and lengthy set-up times cannot be catered for. Please contact us before making a proposal to discuss requirements;
- State whether your proposal is for participation on site or remotely. If remotely performing please also state your networked environment of choice.

Send proposals to Garrett Lynch:

Email: glynch[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk (proposals as zipped attachments less than 10mb).

Full registration details will be announced at a later date. Attending conference participants will be required to cover their own travel and if required, accommodation expenses. Travel information as well as a list of affordable hotels will be posted on the conference website.

Literature in the first part of the 21st Century continues to undergo a revolution. Whether playing to the new aesthetic or re-imagining the literary tradition, emerging works are responding to and shaping the changing nature of reading. The Society for Literature Science and the Arts has been a long-standing center for scholarship on electronic literature. This year, electronic literature will be showcased in a juried showcase at the 2012 SLSA conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The event is co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization.

Submit 250-300-word description and links to elitSLSA12 [at] gmail.com (Subject: Submission). Descriptions should emphasize the performative nature of the presentation. Proposals should include the title and a short description of the work (including any links to your material), a plan for presentation, technology requirements, and a short (50 words) bio for each participant. Available technology will be audio, projector, and wifi.

Deadline: Sept. 1, 2012
Note: All participants must register for the SLSA conference and must be in attendance at the reading. No remote presentations will be accepted.

The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers. While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice. MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them. It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.

Reality television and confessional journalism have done much to invert the relations between private and public. But the borders have long been malleable. Historically, we know that camera-armed Kodakers and telephone party lines threatened the status quo of the private; that the media were complicit in keeping from the public FDR’s disability and the foibles of the ruling elite; and that paparazzi and celebrities are strategically intertwined in the game of publicity. How have the various media played these roles (and represented them), and how is the issue changing at a moment when most of our mediated transactions leave data traces that not only redefine the borders of the private, but that serve as commodities in their own right?

The public, too, is a contested space. Edmund Burke’s late 18th century invocation of the fourth estate linked information flow and political order, anticipating aspects of Habermas’s public sphere. From this perspective, trends such as a siege on public service broadcasting, a press in decline, and media fragmentation on the rise, all ring alarm bells. Yet WikiLeaks and innovative civic uses of media suggest a sharp countertrend. What are the fault lines in this struggle? How have they been represented in media texts, enacted through participants and given form in media policy? And what are we to make of the fate of a public culture in a world whose media representations are increasingly on-demand, personalized and algorithmically-designed to please?

Finally, MiT8 is also concerned with the private-public rift that appears most frequently in struggles over intellectual property (IP). Ever-longer terms of IP protection combined with a shift from media artifacts (like paper books) to services (like e-journals) threaten long-standing practices such as book lending (libraries) and raise thorny questions about cultural access. Social media sites, powered by users, often remain the private property of corporations, akin to the public square’s replacement by the mall, and once-public media texts, like certain photographic and film collections, have been re-privatized by an array of institutions. These undulations in the private and public have implications for our texts (remix culture), our access to them, and our activities as audiences; but they also have a rich history of contestation, evidenced in the copybook and scrapbook, compilation film, popular song and the open source and creative commons movement.

MiT8 encourages a broad approach to these issues, with specific attention to textual practice, users, policy and cultural implications. As usual, we encourage work from across media forms and across historical periods and cultural regions.

Possible topics include:

Media traces: cookies, GPS data, TiVo and Kindle tracking
The paradoxes of celebrity and the public persona
Representing the anxieties of the private in film, tv, literature
MMORPGs / identities / virtual publics
The spatial turn in media: private consumption in public places
Historical media panics regarding the private-public divide
When cookies shape content, what happens to the public?
Creative commons and the new public sphere
Big data and privacy
Party lines and two-way radio: amplifying the private
The fate of public libraries in the era of digital services
Methodologies of internet and privacy studies
Creative commons, free software, and the new public sphere
Public and civic WiFi access to the internet
Surveillance, monitoring and their (dis)contents
Submit an Abstract and Short Bio
Short abstracts for papers should be about 250 words in a PDF or Word format and should be sent as email attachments to mit8@mit.edu no later than Friday, March 1, 2013. Please include a short (75 words or fewer) biographical statement.

We will be evaluating submissions on a rolling basis beginning in November and will respond to every proposal.

Include a Short Bibliography
For this year’s conference, we recommend that you include a brief bibliography of no more than one page in length with your abstract and bio.

Proposals for Full Panels
Proposals for full panels of three or four speakers should include a panel title and separate abstracts and bios for each speaker. Anyone proposing a full panel should recruit a moderator.

Submit a Full Paper
In order to be considered for inclusion in a conference anthology, you must submit a full version of your paper prior to the beginning of the conference.

If you have any questions about the eighth Media in Transition conference, please contact Brad Seawell at seawell [at] mit.edu.

Von Foerster coined the idea of a ‘cybernetics of cybernetics’ as a way to analyze the control of control and the (set-up of) communication of communication(-systems). The question is if a ‘third order’ cybernetics is emerging… and, if so, what would it entail? (Related)

Paper Proposals dealing with one or more of the following subjects within this conceptual framing will be welcome:

Agence TOPO, a Montreal-based artist-run centre for new media, launches a new call for projects for its series Sortir de l’écran / Spoken Screen. This program, initiated in 2007 with the NT2 Lab (University of Quebec in Montréal), presents (hyper)media works that incorporate a performative aspect and which explore the links between the screen and the off-screen space: poetry readings and interpretations, participative performances, interactive devices, etc.

For its coming editions, Agence TOPO will consider proposals of works comprising a narrative and performative dimension that fosters visual, audio and textual exploration, both in its physical and on-screen aspects.

The selected artists and projects will benefit from technical support for a period of 4 to 8 weeks within a residency program that can be spread out over time depending on the artists’ needs and specific project requirements. The planned release dates of the series are in spring and autumn 2013-2014.

In order to respect the foreseen deadlines, projects currently under development and those demonstrating a strong commitment from the artists will be given priority.

Artists interested in this theme, and by the production context offered by Agence TOPO are encouraged to submit their proposals before October 15th 2012.

We do not accept proposals sent by email or only available through a website.
Avoid covers and stapled documents to facilitate photocopy.

Travel and residence conditions

Travel and residence costs are not covered by Agence TOPO. For artists living outside of Montréal, travel and residence costs will need to be addressed by a specific agreement. The residency acceptance may be conditional on the financial contribution of external partners.

AgenceTOPO.qc.ca

Agence TOPO is an artist-run centre for new media whose mandate is to produce, disseminate and distribute multimedia works which explore new narrativities and interdisciplinary and intercultural intersections. See the Presentation section of the site for the series Sortir de l’écran/Spoken Screen 2007-2009.

The Japan Media Arts Festival is a comprehensive festival of Media Arts that honors outstanding works in the four divisions of Art, Entertainment, Animation, and Manga, as well as providing a platform for appreciation of the works that have won awards. The 15th Festival received a record 2,714 works from 57 countries and regions around the world, demonstrating its continuing evolution as an established annual international festival.

For the 16th Festival, entries are sought in various disciplines of Media Arts including interactive art, video, websites, games, animation and comics, and from professional, amateur, independent and commercial sources.

Entries will be accepted from Thursday, July 12 to Thursday, September 20 (please note that late entries will not be accepted). The award-winning works will be announced in mid-December. The Exhibition of Award-winning Works, with approximately 150 award-winning works and jury selections, will be held at The National Art Center, Tokyo from February 13 to 24, 2013.

*For more detailed information about the entry process, please check the Guidelines for Entry (PDF) on the Japan Media Arts Festival official website.

Comics published in book form, comics published in a magazine (including works still being serialized), comics published online (for computer or mobile), self-published comics, etc.

*Note that in all divisions professional, amateur, independent, and commercial works are eligible for submission.

Eligibility

Works must be completed or released between Friday, September 23, 2011 and Thursday, September 20, 2012.

– Please confirm the work fits the above timeframe.
– Works that were renewed, changed, completed, presented or released during the above time period are eligible for submission.
– While there is no limit on the number of submissions made, the same work may not be submitted to multiple divisions.
– The entrant must hold the copyright to the submitted work. If the work is submitted by a representative, permission from the copyright holder must be obtained.
– Each entrant must read, understand, and accept the Entry Rules and Regulations before submitting work. (please click here to view the Entry Rules and Regulations)
– By submitting their work, the entrant is deemed to have accepted the Entry Rules and Regulations as stated.

Awards

For each division, one Grand Prize, four Excellence Awards, and three New Face Awards will be awarded on the basis of artistic quality and creativity. In addition, a Special Achievement Award will be awarded on the recommendation of the Jury to a person or group having made a special contribution to Media Arts in each of the four specified divisions.

Sensate is a new online interdisciplinary journal publishing works of critical media practice. It is currently accepting submissions from academics, scientists and artists interested in working on collaborative projects which cross the boundaries between research and making.

Building on the groundswell of pioneering activities in the digital humanities, scholarly publishing, and innovative media practice, we believe in creating a space for redefining the terms in which such collaborations can be presented, articulating modes of working that are derived from artistic practice with revised standards for peer-reviewed academic production. It is with this goal in mind that Sensate aims at publishing innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences, providing a forum for scholarly and artistic experiments not conducive to the printed page.

Call for Submissions and Reviews

Exploring new ways to archive, curate, and organize academic multimedia scholarship, Sensate invites submissions of scholarship and art not conducive to the printed page. We encourage submissions that creatively bridge research and media-based work, and aim beyond an illustrative relation between text and image towards both solid and innovative modes of scholarship and artistic practice.

The integration of form and content is crucial to our mission and thus rather than a list of guiding questions (which seek answers) we would like to offer a list of possible approaches that demonstrate efforts to unite form and content and to provoke inquiry through creative combinations of exposition and expression.

We are currently seeking work in any of the following categories/disciplines: artistic research, visual arts and artistic practice, history of technology and the media arts, visual anthropology and sensory ethnography, digital humanities, sound studies, media archeology, digital collections of audio and/or visual materials, digital cartography, performance and its documentation, imaging scientific research, and creative data visualization. We also welcome submissions that extend beyond these possibilities.

Sensate pieces may rework or expand traditional scholarship in a media rich context, or provide a space to remediate artistic projects in a new form. See our collection of published works at SensateJournal.com.

We are also seeking reviews for films, events, books, exhibitions, and performances. Please visit our blog, Sensate.tumblr.com, for updates on calls for specific reviews.

Submissions are due by September 30th.
Please use the Chicago Manual of Style for all citations.

Hybrid City is an international biennial event dedicated to exploring the emergent character of the city and the potential transformative shift of the urban condition, as a result of ongoing developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and of their integration in the urban physical context. After the successful homonymous symposium in 2011, the second edition of Hybrid City has grown into a peer reviewed conference, aiming to promote dialogue and knowledge exchange among experts drawn from academia, as well as artists, designers, researchers, advocates, stakeholders and decision makers, actively involved in addressing questions on the nature of the technologically mediated urban activity and experience.

Hybrid City Conference 2013, in Athens, Greece, will consist of three days of paper presentations, discussions, workshops and satellite events, under the theme Subtle rEvolutions. The events will be hosted by the faculty of Communication and Media Studies, of the University of Athens and are in particular organized by the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC), in collaboration with the New Technologies Laboratory of the faculty. The main venue of the conference is the central, historic building of the University of Athens, while workshops, projects’ presentations and parallel events will take place in collaborating centers and institutions in the center of Athens.

The “Hybrid City” events are realized in the context of the “City is a Hybrid Interface – HYBRI-C” project of the EACEA Culture programme 2007-2013.

Theme – Subtle rEvolutions

ICTs, whether mobile, wireless or embedded in persistent architectural forms, facilitate the collection and dissemination of data, infusing the physical expression of the city with digital layers of content, contributing thus to the emergence of new hybridized spatial logics and novel forms of social interaction. These systems and the hybrid spatial experience they afford, encourage encounters among users; both embodied and mediated, and influence community dynamics, giving rise to networks around common interests and collectives of affect. Sometimes, such groups, irrespective of how ephemeral, unstable and dispersed they may be, negotiate a new kind of engagement with the urban environment and civic life, suggesting thus an organizational paradigm that manages to surpass traditional vertical hierarchies of space and consequently of power and control. Such configurations among communities, locations, contexts and intentions were manifested intensely in the interlinking of protest events around the world since 2011, the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy movement and anti-austerity demonstrations in Southern Europe, but they also gradually permeate everyday life in the contemporary metropolis.

As sharing and collaborative tactics migrate from online culture to the urban realm and ICTs become increasingly open and personalized, rich opportunities for new forms of participation in civic life arise. Citizens are enabled to access information about the city but also to become involved in the production, collection and distribution of data related to urban matters. The Hybrid City Conference considers a further investigation of such processes of crucial importance, so as to gain a deeper understanding of the effect they have on the urban experience and to explore their contribution in shaping the future cities. In this respect, Hybrid City cordially invites papers both of a theoretical and practical approach that present concepts, case studies, projects, works of art and best practices that promote the discussion on the theme. Emphasizing the inherently interdisciplinary nature of technologically mediated urban activity, we welcome proposals which critically examine, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Open cities, open urban data.
• Environmental sensing and the Internet of things.
• Urban data visualization.
• Environmental perception, cognition, immersion and presence in the context of hybrid urban spaces.
• Citizen science and peer production of knowledge.
• Psychosocial perspectives into the impact of locative and pervasive media use.
• Placemaking, place attachment and place identity in the hybrid city.
• Cartography of hybrid spaces. • Mobile commons and wireless practices.
• Public spaces and mediated presence.
• Gamifying the urban space: playful engagement and game-like citizenship.
• Hybrid spaces of conflict: forms of power and counterpower in the networked city.
• Tactical media practices in the urban context.
• From open data to data commons.
• Open source models of policy and governance.
• Emerging currencies and values.
• Issues of data ownership and copyrights in hybrid urban contexts.

Keynote speakers confirmed so far:

• Roger Malina, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Technology, University of Texas, Dallas, Co Chair Art-Science Program, Mediterranean Institute of Advanced Studies, Marseille
• Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing and Head of the School of Computer Science at The University of Nottingham, member of the Mixed Reality Laboratory and of Horizon, author of ‘Performing Mixed Reality’ (with Gabriella Giannachi), MIT Press.
• Eric Kluitenberg, independent theorist and writer on culture, media, and technology, editor in chief of Tactical Media Files, an online documentation resource of Tactical Media practices worldwide.

All accepted papers will be included in the printed conference proceedings and provided to conference attendants.

Submissions for papers:

Submissions should include:
* Extended abstract of 1000 words max.
* Biographical statement of no more than 250 words.
Submissions should be in a Word or PDF format and not exceed 10 Mb in size. Please upload submitted files at: [uranus.media.uoa.gr] .

Important Dates:

All abstracts will be peer reviewed. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified before the 20th of December 2012. Final submission of full papers will be expected no later than the 20th of February 2013.

Deadline of Abstract Submission: 20 October 2012.

Notification of Acceptance: 20 December 2012.

Deadline of Full Paper Submission: 20 February 2013.

Conference Dates: 23-25 May 2013.

For any queries or further info please contact us at: hybridcityarthens [at] gmail.com

Awkward_NYC, or “The New York City Map of Awkward Social Interactions in Public Spaces,” is a collaborative online map for reporting social accidents and small interpersonal traumas that occur unexpectedly in public spaces. The map pinpoints sites in the New York Metropolitan area where misunderstandings, outbursts, physical altercations, arguments between friends or strangers, and romantic spats or break-ups have occurred. These mishaps are characteristic of the human urban experience — they’re unsettling, often comic, strangely powerful mini-narratives and dramas that would otherwise go untold, but may linger in memory for months and years, as we move through the same urban landscapes, day in and day out.

Anyone can add a story to the map; the project is fully web-based and participatory. The map taps into the confessional, voyeuristic, narrative impulses that typify online behavior and subverts the notion of mapping as reductive, objective, and authoritative. As stories are added to the map, a series of data visualizations depicting the emotional terrain of the city will be generated.

Zannah Marsh is a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, educator, and programmer with an interest in narrative data and collaborative storytelling. She has taught multimedia art and design at New York University, the New School, and in the City University of New York system. Zannah was a resident researcher at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and she’s interned with the Creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research and with Area/Code Games in New York City. She also worked as an exhibit developer at the Museum of Science in Boston, producing internationally-traveling interactive exhibits. She has a MPS from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009), and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2000).

Since the internet entered the public domain in the early 90’s there has been an explosion in artistic interest in its use as a means, site and context for creative practice. Much of this practice is performative in nature; either originating from a performance background and using the internet as a new site and/or augmenting aspect of that practice or is a form of practice developed as direct response to the internet and becomes performative to some degree in its spectatorship.

It has been well established that the internet is not the first or only example of the use of a networked technology repurposed for creative practice. There is a clear time line that can be traced back through the practice of Roy Ascott and his coining of the term Telematic Art in the 1980’s to artist’s use of satellite networks, telephone and other telecommunication devices as each were invented. Seen in this respect the internet can be considered as one of many networked technologies that has enabled networked performance.

The internet is unique however in that it is not a singular network type that favours a particular form of media, broadcast or spectatorship. Most famously known as the network of networks it enables multiple protocols of which the world wide web’s http is just one, is multimedia in nature and encourages intertextual folding and layering of media, is multi-directional not simply a broadcast communication form, de-centralised in ownership and the majority of its technologies are openly accessible.

Remote Encounters, a two-day international conference with performance evening, aims to explore the use of networks as a means to enhance or create a wide variety of performance arts. How do networks as a site for performance provide opportunities for us as artists and performers? In particular how can we remotely collaborate, merge geographically separate places and times, reconfigure the space of performance and the relationship between artist and audience?

:: Call for papers and performances ::

Contributions are invited from practitioners and academics for papers and performances that contextualise current networked performance themes and issues both historically and across the spectrum of different types of networks, explore the wealth of performance opportunities offered by the internet and give a sample of future directions for networked performance.

New sites, new narratives, new genre:
- Networks as new sites of opportunism;
- Networked spaces as new territories;
- Transmedia storytelling, new narratives;
- Mixed reality narratives;
- Personal and private spaces as public venue;
- First, second and third person narratives;
- Intertextuality;

The relationship between artist and audience:
- Primary and secondary audiences, local and global;
- Audience as performer;
- Interactive performances and breaking down the fourth wall;
- The transformation of audience to user;
- Strategies and levels of engagement;
- The network as a means for converging and collaborative practice.

Tools and technologies:
- Democratisation of form and presentation;
- Subverting networked communication media;
- Alternative and community based networks;
- Tubes and streams, from public access television to webcasting;
- Virtual worlds and video gaming;
- Social networking as performance;
- Pervasive and locative performance;
- Physical interfaces and feedback;
- Telephony and SMS messaging.

We are particularly interested in live performance proposals, existing or new, that employ OpenSim and as such could take advantage of a large space provided by the organisers.

For further details and an informal chat contact Garrett Lynch (glynch[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk) or Inga Burrows (iburrows[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk)

:: Submissions ::

Deadline: 4pm (GMT), Friday 31/08/12

Proposals are now being accepted for paper presentations and live performances delivered both at the venue and remotely. Your proposal should take the form of an OpenOffice (.odf), Word (.doc), .pdf or .rtf document only.

Proposals for papers should include the following:

- An abstract (500 words maximum including bibliography);
- A short bio (200 words maximum);
- Full name and full contact details;
- State whether your proposal is for participation on site or remotely.

Proposal for performances should include the following:

- A description of the work (500 words maximum);
- Accompanying media that may include video, images or sound to give us an idea of the proposed work provided online or on CD/DVD;
- A short bio (200 words maximum) with examples of previous works provided online or on CD/DVD;
- Artist(s) / group / performer(s) name and full contact details;
- A full list of required equipment. Note that where possible we will provide equipment however the event will host several performances so highly complex configurations and lengthy set-up times cannot be catered for. Please contact us before making a proposal to discuss requirements;
- State whether your proposal is for participation on site or remotely. If remotely performing please also state your networked environment of choice.

Send proposals to Garrett Lynch:

Email: glynch[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk (proposals as zipped attachments less than 10mb).

Full registration details will be announced at a later date. Attending conference participants will be required to cover their own travel and if required, accommodation expenses. Travel information as well as a list of affordable hotels will be posted on the conference website.

The Imaginary App: A new book about Apps and the way they have changed everything! Featuring many writers, artists, and theoreticians :: Edited By Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky and Svitlana Matviyenko :: CALL FOR ARTISTS — Deadline: October 15, 2012.

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky and Svitlana Matviyenko, editors of The Imaginary App, an anthology of art and scholarship on app-computing, invite artists and designers to submit entries for a traveling art exhibition and publication of selected works in our anthology. Our exhibition will feature original icons of nonexistent apps.

Apps are placed at the tips of our fingers on mobile screens. They offer themselves as channels that navigate us through uncanny media networks and rhizomes. They are shortcuts that guarantee direct and immediate access to what we need beyond the screen. We live in the hope that ubiquitous computing will help us maintain our public and private lives – relationships, work, and leisure – and apps promise to make computation even more seamless and the media environment even more subliminal. If anything, apps reveal how much we depend on this promise when we imagine our being with each other as being with technology.

The goal of this project is to challenge the limits of technological assistance endorsed by the slogan: “There’s an app for that.” What are the most desirable, terrifying, or ridiculous apps that haven’t been and, possibly, will never be released? Formulate a concept of an app. Translate it in the language of design.

As part of the Zero1 Biennial, John Bruneau and James Morgan are bringing together a wide range of game developers to show in a classic golden age setting. We are building a half a dozen arcade cabinets and collecting a few others from the area.

We were inspired by Anna Anthropy’s message that everyone should make games, and by conversations that we have had with her about the place of the arcade and playing in public.

Curators will be welcome to put what they like into their cabinet, solicit people, choose them or even use the games from people they know or admire. The point is to curate along the lines of a theme that will then be represented by the cabinet in a larger context.

The games will be presented in the arcade cabinet (choose the graphics for the exterior if you like) at Works/San Jose. Works is a volunteer run gallery with a 30 plus year history of serving emerging artists and performance.

We also have a unique opportunity which would involve crafting a “living room gaming space” for the gallery that lets us actualize some social play with the community. We really see this exhibition being about bringing people together and letting them play games together.

Additionally a swap meet will run the duration of the show where people can bring old games, games they made whatever to trade for games left by others.

If you are interested please send a brief proposal (games, theme, platform or whatever makes sense) to coop [at] factorynoir.com

Through this Open Call, four performances/theories will be selected by a peer panel. Over the course of three months, the conference organizers will provide space and other resources to these theorizing projects.

Performance-makers/theorists need not have any theater or formal artistic background, but must propose to use the form of performance to propose a theoretical position or question. The process of performance-makers/theorists is likely to resemble the following:

1.) Theorist approaches a question, hypothesis, or problem/paradox
2.) Theorist researches the question, tests the hypothesis, or re-creates/ makes evident the problem/ paradox
3.) Theorist answers the question, proves or disproves the hypothesis, or formalizes the problem /paradox AS A PERFORMANCE.

Each project will be paired with a critical writer (an arts writer, philosopher, cultural critic, etc), who will observe the process of creating the presentation and be in dialogue with the theorist, becoming the first formal respondent to that work. This first stage of production will culminate in a conference weekend in New York City, during which conference participants will gather and the four projects will be performed. In Stage 2, panel discussions lead by the four critical writers will follow each performance, and conference participants will be invited to consider and discuss the presentations via various political, theoretical, and analytical contexts of their choosing. All participants in this public weekend conference will also be invited to submit written responses to be published in a hard-copy Gazette and online; these written documents constitute the third stage of the project. Stage 4 will consist of a final day-long public discussion that will consider the written responses and previous discussions. The entire process will be documented and excerpts made available via online or print publishing after the event.

Theorems, Proofs, Rebuttals, and Propositions: A Conference of Theoretical Theater began with the simple conception of “theater” as a public site for insight (in Greek, theater means “seeing place”), tied intrinsically to theory or “ways of seeing.” This conference is based on the premise that performance is not just an artistic medium, it is also a vast and complex conceptual/ philosophic structure (multiplicitous, logarithmic, exponential, quantum). We posit performance as an “uncanny social science,” a way of researching human social experience by being it, by encompassing, constructing, simultaneously causing and being caused-by business, community and kinship conceptions, systems of definition like gender and race, political and institutional constructs, and so on. There is no praxical division between academic fields of inquiry. Modes must be researched and developed by everyone, across artistic mediums, across social and “hard” sciences, across daily living patterns, across conversations and other communications.

The project seeks both to recognize, theorize, and authorize performance-making as a constructive theorizing and envisioning act that may have the agency to escape autonomous artistic spheres and participate in co-construction of public discourse and, as a performance project itself, to invent, theorize, test, bend, expand, and corrupt the conference’s own overarching theory and mode of production.

TIMELINE

Open Call out April 15, 2012
Proposals due August 15, 2012
Theorists and Writers notified October 1, 2012
March-June, 2013 Fundraiser and open rehearsals
July 12, 13, 14, Public Conference is held in New York City
July 30, Gazette released
Mid-August, TBD, 2013, final critical panel in New York City

PROPOSAL GUIDELINES:

Applicants need not be artists or performers, nor have experience with creating performance, but may also be historians, philosophers, cultural critics, activists, scientists, or thinkers in any discipline. Similarly, theories need not be specifically theories of performance, but can be theoretical positions dealing with any aspect of time, space, causality, communication, morality, mind, body, society, being, aesthetics, politics, arts, sciences, knowledge or other major theoretical concerns that can be activated in the situation of performance. Successful applicants will propose the active mode, form, or medium of their theory, instead of simply describing their theory in a theatrical style. It is expected that given conditions of performance (not limited to venue, audience, authorship, shared temporality, etc.) will be utilized or subverted in order to instantiate a theoretical position.

In addition to a theory, questions, mode of research, etc, prospective theorists/performance-makers should request the materials and resources they need to develop and perform their project, and be as specific as possible in describing their intended project. Applicants must be available during the times specified in the timeline.

Four proposals will be chosen by a small interdisciplinary panel of jurors based on cohesion of vision and feasibility.

1. On the top of the first page, please include the following information: Name, Address, E-mail, Phone number, Website (if applicable)

2. Please send a proposal (less than 2 pages) for a theoretical performance. Please be as specific as possible. Proposal guidelines are purposefully vague in order to allow for a multiplicity of approaches.

Please email your proposal as an attachment, along with a CV, resume, or narrative biography (up to 500 words).

Both individuals and groups are welcome to apply. Send your application totheatertheoryconference [at] gmail.com no later than August 15, 2012.

The form of this conference is unusual, and it seeks to engage an interdisciplinary community of thinkers. Therefore, you may have questions about one or more aspects of the conference or the call for proposals. Please do not hesitate to e-mail us with your questions, requests for clarification, or comments.

Theorems, Proofs, Rebuttals, and Propositions: A Conference of Theoretical Theater is a project of Esther Neff (Panoply Performance Laboratory) and Yelena Gluzman. The conference is a project supported through Culture Push’s Honorary Fellowship for Utopian Practices. Click HERE for more information.

Key advancements in real-time graphics and video processing over the past five years have resulted in broad implications for a number of academic, research and commercial communities. They enabled interaction designers, live visualists (VJs), game programmers, and information architects to utilize the power of advanced digital technologies to model, render and effect visual information in real-time.

1. The future of cinema: Is it live?
2. Gaming and art, how real-time games and art collide.
3. Hardware hacking and physical computing in real-time.
4. Expressive interaction instruments for live visuals.
5. Design methodologies and composition techniques that support live visuals performance.
6. Ethical implications of real-time imaging for art, design and culture.

It has been more than six decades since cybernetics was introduced to the English-speaking world by Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Warren Weaver. Stimulated by the information explosion in the 195Os, it grew as an international phenomenon that challenged disciplinary boundaries and preconceptions. Cybernetic models of “self-reproducing automata” brought about an enhanced understanding of informational and communication systems, engendered artificial intelligence and machine-biological interfaces (cyborgs), and impacted game theory.

In the West, cybernetics had a lasting effect on art and popular culture from interactive art, performance, and computer art, to telematic art and American Idol. The “new science,” however, received a different reception in USSR. After its initial hostility, the Soviet government endorsed cybernetics as a panacea ensuring the rational control of a failing centralized economy. The interdisciplinary umbrella of Soviet cybernetics protected underground art — from kinetic constructions and installations, to conceptual art and performance.

The session redresses a lack of attention to cybernetics globally. It invites presenters in the visual arts and from non-art disciplines to reconsider or generate new knowledge about generations and geographies of art and cybernetics, including practices that create, distribute, and theorize art forms, concepts, and histories.

Papers may explore cybernetic phenomena in artistic environments; examine artistic play on logic and reason; consider how art or non-art agents treat cybernetics as a social and cultural paradigm, or question how cybernetics is presented in historiographies of recent art and what interfaces of cybernetics and art bode for intra- and inter-disciplinary research and practice.

1. Preliminary abstract of one to two double-spaced, typed pages;
2. Letter explaining speaker’s interest and expertise in the topic;
3. CV with home and office mailing addresses, email address, and phone numbers.
4. Documentation of work when appropriate, especially for sessions in which artists might discuss their own work.

We are working on publishing the session papers.

AAH2013 represents the interests of an expansive art-historical community by covering all branches of its discipline/s and the range of its visual cultures. Academic sessions reflect a broad chronological range, as well as a wide geographical one. The conference addresses topics of methodological, historiographical, and interdisciplinary interest as well as ones that open up debates about the future of the discipline/s. AAH2013 will take place over three days at the historic University of Reading, Berkshire.

The Center for Book and Paper Arts, a program of the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago, recently received a $50,000 Arts in Media grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of a new electronic publishing initiative, Expanded Artists’ Books. This grant will support an award of two $10,000 commissions for new artworks for the iPad. These will have physical counterparts that intersect, modulate, or inform the digital components of the artwork.

Artists’ books claim all aspects of the book (format, typography, structure, etc.) as potentially expressive. As immersive hybrid experiences for the reader/viewer, these works expand the limits of what we traditionally think of as a book. Simultaneously, we consider that tablet-based mobile platforms are emerging as a dynamic arena for investigation of the notion of the book. Expanded Artists’ Books utilize the rich capabilities of the tablet platform to imagine new forms that a book might take, such as exploring how interactivity challenges the traditional closure of text or the performance of time. We are currently focused specifically on Apple’s iPad as a site for exploration of this conceptually rich territory.

amberFestival is interested in interactive installations that explore the theme of Paratactic Commons in today’s world. We see the theme as a tool to think and work with, and the festival as an opportunity to raise an artistic voice. You alone will define that voice.

Paratactic Commons: The decade that followed 9/11 witnessed a radical regression of communal energies, forcing us to live strictly in individual spheres; the fear and control society in the guise of a war on terror, the tendency of nation-states to impose their ideological agendas onto everyone and everything under their control and the conflicts and collaborations of a global consumerist economy that urges the rapid privatization of public goods have all taken a toll on the common values of human societies around the Globe. The commons that we need to regain entail a broad spectrum. They range from ecological unbalances, which result from the privatization of natural resources, to the ‘de facto’ privatization of judicial systems, which has led to the degradation of a justice that is common to all.

Meanwhile, the ever-popularizing digital media, beginning with the Internet itself as a common resource, has been a major source of inspiration in revitalizing the idea of the commons. More specifically, the capacities offered by new media have helped to re-understand that information is a ‘common’ as well as the right to access information.

amber’12 selects as its theme ‘Paratactic Commons’: Can digital commons be an alternative platform to launch a political thought whose main aim is sharing, transparency, and freedom to access information? What can we learn from free software’s, copyleft movements, peer-2-peer systems, the logic of open source, and creative commons? Could the digital-commons help for the creation of another form of economy and ecology? Could humans share their common resources rather than exploit them? What kind of paratactic artistic strategies could digital commons consist of?

Bring to Light is a site-specific contemporary art exhibition that illuminates the streets, parks, and industrial waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Bring to Light is New York’s “nuit blanche,” part of a global network of locally organized nighttime art festivals.

An investigation of the tension and transformation underway throughout the New York waterfront, Bring to Light seeks proposals from artists exploring innovative approaches to temporary public art that engages the built environment and re-imagines public space. Through this unique annual intervention, the streetlights and everyday buzz of the sidewalks, parks, and piers of the industrial waterfront are replaced by the ephemeral glow of interactive installations and contemplative spectacle. Layering time-based media with architectural space, Bring to Light illuminates historic warehouses and contested shorelines as sites teeming with creative potential. Unexpected immersive environments invite a range of engagement — from active participation to quiet spectatorship.

Artists are encouraged to carefully consider the use of illumination and address how the work may function in its outdoor context. Limited indoor sites may also be available. While we accept submissions from artists working in any medium, work presented at Bring to Light commonly includes:

Proposals will be evaluated based on the following criteria:
-Site-specificity or responsiveness–work that is designed to engage and transform its location
-Articulation of a strong concept, rooted in a demonstrated artistic practice
-Artist’s ability and preparedness to execute work as proposed
-Attention to the relationship of the artwork to the spectator/participant
-Innovation in content, technology or process

Submissions will be reviewed on an ongoing basis and all proposals must be submitted by 11:59 PM on July 13th for consideration.

A {Digital} Stitch In Time :: Calling all artists whose practices are at the intersection of art, craft and digital technologies to be considered for inclusion in a writing project about artist projects employing needlecraft techniques to translate, redefine and recontextualize images and lexicon sourced from digital and virtual culture.

No longer reserved for our grandmothers, needlecraft has become a subversive tool of counter-culture, interrogating knowledge and meaning, while encouraging an intimate participation with the digital through a laborious, and social process. Whether it is revealing the underlying relationship between computer coding and embroidery patterns, or documenting the digital landscape through a portrait of cotton cross-stitches, we consider the meaning of “social networks” and participatory production as artists explore collective meaning and ownership in the digital age.

If you are interested in having your work considered for inclusion in the article, please email an artist statement, CV and link to images of your work to: digitalstitching [at] gmail.com

Since the internet entered the public domain in the early 90’s there has been an explosion in artistic interest in its use as a means, site and context for creative practice. Much of this practice is performative in nature; either originating from a performance background and using the internet as a new site and/or augmenting aspect of that practice or is a form of practice developed as direct response to the internet and becomes performative to some degree in its spectatorship.

It has been well established that the internet is not the first or only example of the use of a networked technology repurposed for creative practice. There is a clear time line that can be traced back through the practice of Roy Ascott and his coining of the term Telematic Art in the 1980’s to artist’s use of satellite networks, telephone and other telecommunication devices as each were invented. Seen in this respect the internet can be considered as one of many networked technologies that has enabled networked performance.

The internet is unique however in that it is not a singular network type that favours a particular form of media, broadcast or spectatorship. Most famously known as the network of networks it enables multiple protocols of which the world wide web’s http is just one, is multimedia in nature and encourages intertextual folding and layering of media, is multi-directional not simply a broadcast communication form, de-centralised in ownership and the majority of its technologies are openly accessible.

Remote Encounters, a two-day international conference with performance evening, aims to explore the use of networks as a means to enhance or create a wide variety of performance arts. How do networks as a site for performance provide opportunities for us as artists and performers? In particular how can we remotely collaborate, merge geographically separate places and times, reconfigure the space of performance and the relationship between artist and audience?

:: Call for papers and performances ::

Contributions are invited from practitioners and academics for papers and performances that contextualise current networked performance themes and issues both historically and across the spectrum of different types of networks, explore the wealth of performance opportunities offered by the internet and give a sample of future directions for networked performance.

New sites, new narratives, new genre:
- Networks as new sites of opportunism;
- Networked spaces as new territories;
- Transmedia storytelling, new narratives;
- Mixed reality narratives;
- Personal and private spaces as public venue;
- First, second and third person narratives;
- Intertextuality;

The relationship between artist and audience:
- Primary and secondary audiences, local and global;
- Audience as performer;
- Interactive performances and breaking down the fourth wall;
- The transformation of audience to user;
- Strategies and levels of engagement;
- The network as a means for converging and collaborative practice.

Tools and technologies:
- Democratisation of form and presentation;
- Subverting networked communication media;
- Alternative and community based networks;
- Tubes and streams, from public access television to webcasting;
- Virtual worlds and video gaming;
- Social networking as performance;
- Pervasive and locative performance;
- Physical interfaces and feedback;
- Telephony and SMS messaging.

We are particularly interested in live performance proposals, existing or new, that employ OpenSim and as such could take advantage of a large space provided by the organisers.

For further details and an informal chat contact Garrett Lynch (glynch[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk) or Inga Burrows (iburrows[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk)

:: Submissions ::

Deadline: 4pm (GMT), Friday 31/08/12

Proposals are now being accepted for paper presentations and live performances delivered both at the venue and remotely. Your proposal should take the form of an OpenOffice (.odf), Word (.doc), .pdf or .rtf document only.

Proposals for papers should include the following:

- An abstract (500 words maximum including bibliography);
- A short bio (200 words maximum);
- Full name and full contact details;
- State whether your proposal is for participation on site or remotely.

Proposal for performances should include the following:

- A description of the work (500 words maximum);
- Accompanying media that may include video, images or sound to give us an idea of the proposed work provided online or on CD/DVD;
- A short bio (200 words maximum) with examples of previous works provided online or on CD/DVD;
- Artist(s) / group / performer(s) name and full contact details;
- A full list of required equipment. Note that where possible we will provide equipment however the event will host several performances so highly complex configurations and lengthy set-up times cannot be catered for. Please contact us before making a proposal to discuss requirements;
- State whether your proposal is for participation on site or remotely. If remotely performing please also state your networked environment of choice.

Send proposals to Garrett Lynch:

Email: glynch[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk (proposals as zipped attachments less than 10mb).

Full registration details will be announced at a later date. Attending conference participants will be required to cover their own travel and if required, accommodation expenses. Travel information as well as a list of affordable hotels will be posted on the conference website.

Code of Contingency explores whether sound, as a learning device, has the potential to open up new pedagogical frameworks. Taking its cue from the improvisational ethics of Cornelius Cardew, the dissipative systems theory of Isabelle Stengers, and the critical thinking developed by Paul Freire, the show investigates process-oriented, anti-anticipatory learning through and when people engage with sound. Here, collaboration between object and viewer, teacher and student, performer and attendees are key for developing a dialogue. As such, code does not play the role of a set of rules or parameters to guide the viewer’s interpretation, rather, it is a notational device used to make sense of knowledge production. The works included in Code of Contingency convey cues of glitches, clicks, growls and burps. These sounds are the product of digital, analogue and biological systems that cross aesthetic boundaries, united together in choral melodies. The artists included often compose through technology, such as sonic detours through the Internet, or working with data that is sonified with live local power consumption stats. Some artists work with organic material, including experimenting with the ecology of the body, or are reacting to political scenarios where the vocal presence of opinion is essential. To open feedback channels, the participating artists will host a series of workshops that will raise critical questions about politics, biology, microbial agency, the currency of time, circuit bending, audio ecologies and the energy that powers it all.

Code of Contingency is a curatorial project initiated by Lisa Baldini and Sarah Jury in September 2010. Sarah Jury is an international curator based in London. She is the director of The Pigeon Wing and editor of Arc magazine, Her writings can be found in Aspidistra, Countersituation and Flee Immediately! Lisa Baldini is an international curator based in New York. Her writings have appeared in Rhizome, PSFK and most recently Flee Immediately! She is a founding member of the MAIM Collective.

Workshops

Code of Contingency will present 7 workshops during the weekend of 16th & 17th organized by the curators and artists. Entry is donation at the door, email info [at] 319scholes for rsvp.

Visit our website for more details on the following workshops

_Key Note Speech: On Failure and the Ontology of Code
_I, Bacteria
_Power Relations
_Screening of Erkki Kurenniemi’s “The Future is Not What It Used To Be” followed by discussion with Tom Richards and curator Lisa Baldini
_Soundwwwalks
_Performance-Lecture on Noise Collector
_Compro Auri in the Subway
319 Scholes supports digital art and experimentation through exhibitions, events, workshops, and live performances.

In his essay What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory, Philip Galanter provocatively suggests that “generative art may be as old as art itself.” [1] The programmatic, mathematical patterns that appear in Islamic tile work, Tibetan mandalas, and textiles from around the globe (and particularly from Jacquard’s early 19th century punch card loom) all exhibit the qualities of generative art: they are produced by preset instructions or procedural rules that dictate the forms and structures they might take. Defining a generative mode of production in its most general terms, Galanter writes, “Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.” [2] Depending on the technology implemented by the artist and the material form of the finished artwork, there can exist wide variations in the degree of the system’s autonomy, the impact of artistic intention and influence, and the complexity or predictability of the system used to generate the artwork. A technology can be as simple as a written set of natural language instructions resulting in a wall drawing in graphite or as complex as a string of computationally executable code that manifests in a spectacular array of screen-based graphics. The degree of artistic intervention in the final product effects the extent to which a system can be defined as functioning autonomously; in a true generative system, the rules of the program are produced by the artist, set into motion, and then left to develop, often in ways that could not be predicted by the artist due to the incursion of random variables.

This special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac seeks to investigate the long history of generative and algorithmic art, from the historical predecessors mentioned above, to contemporary computational artworks. We invite proposals for articles examining generative and algorithmic art practices from the ancient world to the present day, and artists’ projects and pictorial essays engaging with these procedures and structures. Submissions might investigate issues of authorial control, predictability and unpredictability, chance and “aleatoric” methods of art making, or might propose theoretical and philosophical explorations of the concepts of hardware and software, the materiality of generative systems, video feedback as a generative system, the relationship between generative art and cinematic practices, or the historically expansive and ever expanding range of technologies capable of executing generative systems.

Our publication formats allow for full-color throughout and we encourage rich pictorial content where relevant and possible. Note however that all material submitted must be copyright cleared (or due diligence must be evidenced). For online publication a wide variety of media content may be considered (animation, mp3, flash, java, etc…)

For scholarly papers please submit the final paper ready for peer review. Your contribution will be reviewed by at least two members of the LEA board and revisions may be requested subject to review.

For themed and pictorial essays please submit an abstract or outline for editorial consideration and further discussion.

Please keep your news, announcements and hyperlinks brief and focused – include contact details and a link to an external site where relevant. We reserve the right to sub-edit your submissions in order to comply with LEA policies and formats. Where material is time-sensitive please include both embargo and expiry dates.

In all cases specify special system considerations where these are necessary (platform, codecs, plug-ins, etc…)

For further information or image submission contact: Ozden.Sahin [at] leoalmanac.org

We seek projects including, but not limited to, performance art, public actions and interventions, happenings, and acts, taking place in both real and virtual places. The chosen pieces will be presented as part of our events and exhibitions scheduled for the Fall of 2012 at Queens Museum of Art, Outpost Artists Resource, Local Project, Thought the Outdoor Art Space.

Fluid New Media Lab is a New York City-based project that supports, produces, promotes, and initiates creative works by emerging artists working in new media. Fluid New Media Lab functions as an archive - documenting cutting edge original works - as well as serving as a technical and logistical support and resource for artists and art projects. Work produced by Fluid takes different forms including events, exhibitions, and workshops. The works include interactive installations, short film, video, animation, performances and other visual experiments. Fluid opens the scene to a new movement of audiovisual and performing arts in educational and screening space presenting diverse cultural programming.

The Baltic Goes Digital is an open contest for artworks that utilize web-based, mobile or locative media to create a vision of an imaginary, non-existent ‘Baltic City’.

The contest is organized by the Baltic Sea Cultural Centre in Gdansk and the Gdansk City Gallery as part of the international ART LINE project, which is co-financed with funds from the European Regional Development Fund operating within the South Baltic Cross-Border Cooperation Programme 2007-2013.

The contest is aimed at artists and people interested in its subject-matter – i.e. graphic artists, designers, architects, programmers – from the Baltic states (Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Russia).

The teams need to be composed of a maximum of three people. In such a case, at least 1 member needs to be an artist.

WINNERS:

The authors of the 3 winning projects chosen by an international jury will be invited to cooperate with us and complete their works.

Each winning contestant will receive remuneration of EUR 1500 and a budget of EUR 1000 to realize the concept. The organizers will also cover the costs of accommodation and travel to Gdansk for the opening of the Fall 2012 exhibition .

The works will be presented in a virtual gallery, available on the Art Line project website until 2018 and as an exhibition in the Gdansk City Gallery (the Fall of 2012). The winning artworks will be also presented in partner art institutions or during public events.

DEADLINE:

The deadline for submitting applications for the contest is the 15th of June 2012.

JURY:

The winners shall be announced by an international jury composed of 5 experts.

THE GOAL OF THE CONTEST

The goal of the contest is to select three artistic projects that use locative, mobile or online media. They will be completed and presented in a virtual gallery on the ART LINE’s website and in the Fall 2012 exhibition held at the Gdansk City Gallery.

THEMATIC APPROACH:

The theme of the contest involves the creation of an imaginary and utopian version of a ‘Baltic City’ – i.e. a town that no longer exists or does not exist yet. Obviously, the very idea of creating an utopian city is nothing new. History knows many urban planning and architectural designs that aimed to create the perfect municipal tapestry that would be ideal for its residents. What is new is the fact that the starting point of ‘The Baltic Goes Digital’ contest is s modern technique that supports unlimited urban visions. Taking advantage of the fact that the internet allows us to get to know the world, the Gdansk City Gallery together with the Baltic Sea Cultural Centre would like to invite artists to compose interactive spaces combining the cultural and urban aspects of cities located on the Baltic Sea. The digitally-generated cities can be both a combination of existing ones, expansions or improvements on them or an utopian vision of a single Baltic city that goes beyond our reality or remains parallel to it.

The Gdansk City Gallery and the Baltic Sea Cultural invite artists and teams whose projects explore and redefine the public space concept.

We ask whether the new digitalized public space offered by the internet can be used to create and communicate art. Can works of art that function in the internet arena or are widely accessible through our mobile phones be treated in the same way as a bronze sculpture in the main square of a city? What new public space opportunities are offered by these new technologies? The Gdansk City Gallery and the Baltic Sea Cultural would like to invite artists to submit projects that explore these issues and provide interesting answers.

2. General principles of participation:
a. Applications shall only be accepted in the English language.
b. The strict deadline for filing applications shall be the 15th of June 2012. The date on the postal stamp (date of sending) shall be decisive for applications sent by mail or courier; the final deadline for applications sent by e-mail shall be the 15th of June 2012 at 23:59.
c. The costs of delivering the applications, including the costs of CDs/DVDs/pen drives sent with them, as well as any and all transportation fees shall be borne by the applicant. The applicant shall also be responsible for any and all customs fees payable outside Poland and obliged to comply with the customs regulations applicable to the transportation of mail.
d. The contest is open to individuals as well as teams (composed of a maximum of three). All the members of a team need to come from the countries indicated to in point 1.3 and at least one person needs to have an artistic CV. The application should also name one person who is responsible for the entire project.
e. Every contestant (or a team) can submit no more than two projects and each of the projects should be sent with a separate application form.
f. The full application shall consist of a completed application form and an attachment containing the project/prototype of work.
g. Any and all materials sent by mail (the form and attachments) need to be in an electronic form (CD / DVD-ROM, pen drive)
h. The project/prototype of work must be sent in a widely-used format (e.g. PDF, JPG, doc, mpeg4, mov, avi, wmv, etc.)
i. The materials and applications submitted shall not be returned.
j. Works that do not meet the aforementioned formal criteria shall not be admitted to the contest.

DURATION AND COURSE OF THE CONTEST:

1. Applications shall be accepted until the 15th of June 2012.
2. The jury will hold its deliberations in June 2012, after the applications have been accepted.
3. The results of the contest shall be published on the 9th of July 2012 at the latest on ART LINE’s website at www.artline-southbaltic.eu, as well as on the organizers’ websites at www.nck.org.pl and www.ggm.gda.pl. Moreover, the winners will be notified directly by e-mail.
4. The winners shall work on completing the selected projects between July and August 2012.
5. The exhibition in the Gdańsk City Gallery shall be held in the Fall of 2012.
6. The awarded projects shall be completed and presented in a virtual gallery available on ART LINE’s website, as well as during the exhibition held in the Gdańsk City Gallery. The works could also be presented by partner institutions of the project at later dates.
7. The authors of the three projects chosen by an international jury composed of five experts shall be invited to complete them. The organizers shall conclude contracts with the winners for specific work connected to the completion of the selected projects, whose value shall be EUR 1500 (gross). In the case of a team, the amount shall be equally distributed among all the members.
8. Moreover, the organizers shall cover the costs of producing the winning works up to EUR 1000 gross.
9. The organizers shall cover the costs of the participants’ travel and accommodation in Gdansk during the exhibition.

Proof-of-Process is a prototype for a community-based research laboratory. It is composed of hybrid exhibitions, workshops and symposia where participants, along with artist-researchers, can interact and collaborate on the development of science and technology-based artworks and research projects at any stage of development — all within a publicly accessible laboratory set-up in the gallery. We seek to create an atmosphere of collaboration, knowledge sharing and creative dialogue. So please come by to participate, offer suggestions, or simply view the work in its various stages.

We are turning Gallery Gachet into a laboratory for: experimentation, workshops and prototyping of science and technology-based artworks. Sign up for workshops and prototyping sessions or simply drop in to view the work as it unfolds!

Drop by to see or collaborate on: a set of intelligent drums that communicate via electrical stimulation, an interactive display of bioluminescent algae, an electrochemical analog computer, and a luminous 3D display connected to a virtual grove of bamboos.

Proof-of-Process fuses research, a DIY production workshop, educational seminars and a gallery exhibition into a singular event. We strongly encourage local artists, musicians, hackers and other interested parties to participate in the workshops and prototyping sessions. Workshops will be led by one or more of the Proof-of-Process artists-researchers and will include demonstrations, discussions and brainstorming.

Proof-of-Process is a production of DPrime Research, a nonprofit research institution specializing in cultural production informed by the intersection of technology, research and the arts.

Generous support for Proof-of-Process has been provided by the Simon Fraser University Graduate Student Society, the School of Interactive Arts & Technology Graduate Student Association and Gallery Gachet.

The 2012 Screengrab New Media Arts Award and associated exhibition is looking for challenging creative works by media arts practitioners working in screen based media to submit works on the theme of Control.

The contemporary media milieu would suggest an evolving devolution of the traditional notion of the “society of control”. The boundaries of enclosures and spaces are no longer the rigid and defined perimeters they once were. The browser, the mobile camera/ screen are new enabling simulations the user can exploit to navigate alternative pathways, to experience new modes of expression and to participate in global cultural exchange.

This is reflected online and on the street. In our political discourse and our social interactions. And it is most visible when repatriated via the mainstream media and traditional news editorials coupled with wild proclamations of “new freedoms” accompanied by “real change”.

Yet what has really changed? What do these new counter measures look like on the ground? Where do the subversions play out? What new questions are we asking of our environment and of ourselves?

In the same evolving moment new far less visible forms of control are emerging that use these very same technological platforms: surveillance networks, social media, data mining algorithms, privacy interventions, sophisticated image gathering techniques and drone technologies. These aggregators of data and network traffic are rapidly translating our private, public and social lives into valuable sets of relational data – re-writing the notion of identity, weaving new paradigms of control.

The Call Out

SCREENGRAB is now entering its fourth year with an international call out for the AUS$5000 New Media Arts Prize and the companion exhibition in August 2012 for short listed applicants. We invite digital practitioners working in screen based media to submit works on the theme of CONTROL.

Memefest, an international organization dedicated to promoting new, productive and relevant forms of cultural activism, together with the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, this year introduces the Memefest/ Griffith-QCA award for ‘Imaginative Critical Intervention’. This award invites cultural activists, creatives and thinkers from the productive margins of professions, radical theorists, imaginative intellectuals and anyone who is uncomfortable with the status quo and dreams of alternative futures that are more satisfying, just, and sustainable, to submit projects for peer feedback, broader dissemination, and a chance to work collaboratively with other imaginative activists, artists, researchers and intellectuals.

Debt! You can’t evict an idea whose time has come!

These words express the nature of the current global movement against the rule of money over life. They belong to the people, the 99%, who are bringing the fundamental urgent issues to the streets, into the media, into the realm of public consciousness, into the schools, universities, jobs, homes and intimate discussions and relationships.

These words also express something else. They speak about a state of mind, a focus and a concise articulation of the problem. The idea whose time has come is mainly about three things. First: interventions that create a rupture in the order of things with the goal to redefine our fields of experience and the relationship between being, doing and saying. Second: dialogue. Third: creating new emancipatory social institutions.

If communication and art are to play a relevant role in shaping a future worth having, we need to further redirect, reinvent and reimagine our own understanding and the way we think, theorise and practice them both. Debt is not only an opportunity to do so, but also an urgent responsibility.

The Friendly Competition

Participants are invited to submit works three categories: critical writing, visual communication practice and the participatory art/communication category Beyond…

This year’s theme for Visual communication practice and Critical writing is: DEBT. Participants will respond with their work to three carefully chosen texts:

I. First written text is taken from the book Debt, the first 5000 years by American social anthropologist David Greaber in which he explains the function of debt in human history, showing that the current situation is not as natural at all as it seems to be.

II. Second visual text is taken from the documentary Debtocracy by Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hatzistefanou, who together with economist Samir Amin, philosopher Alain Badiou, sociologist and geographer David Harvey and other guests research the reasons for the crisis in Greece, while also showing how Latino American Ecuador stood up to the IMF and refused to acknowledge legitimacy to their enforced slavery.

III. Third is the song No Banker Left Behind by American slide guitar virtuoso, taken from his politically engaged and critically acclaimed album Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (2011).

Category Beyond…:

While a lot of subversive writing, communication and art has emerged which challenges the status quo using its own conventions, very few of these initiatives have employed a mode of communication that is not rooted in commercial culture itself.

The ‘Beyond…’ category hopes to bring out new visual and conceptual forms of communication and art which catalyse social change while engaging people as something more than mere consumers.

This category draws on the traditions of independent artistic practice in that the entries will have no brief other than to identity and radically address important issues on a deeply felt personal level. However, we expect that, unlike most ‘museum’ art, it will generate genuine participatory relations with its audience and be able to work outside institutional sites and conventions. Participatory art and communication is the core principle of what we are looking for at Beyond…

The international editorial and curatorial board will select the most convincing works. Among strong traditional awards, which you can see on www.memefest.org, two new awards are introduced this year.

1) The first Griffith-QCA/ Memefest Award for Critical Imaginative Critical Intervention. Best authors of all three categories (critical writing, visual communication practice and Beyond…) will be invited to Brisbane to take part in a special extradisciplinary workshop resulting in a public intervention in the city of Brisbane.

2) Authors of best works in the category: critical writing will be invited to publish their work in the academic peer reviewed journal Zoontechnica.

Deadline for your submissions is May 30th.

Participation is free of charge and there is no age limit or any other restriction. Your work can be submitted online.

FLEFF began its yearlong exploration of Microtopias with concerts, workshops, master classes, performances, and films during the spring. The exploration continues this fall with a juried competition and online exhibition.

FLEFF invites submissions of new media art, tactical media, radical cartography, computer games, locative media, and interactive video for Distributed Microtopias, a juried competition and online exhibition for which one prize of USD250 will be awarded.

Microtopias ask us to imagine the world otherwise, without constraints and limitations, to improve the immediate environment. Microtopias congregate people, ideas, and practices on a local, sustainable, decentralized scale. Microtopias catalyzes social interaction, collective participation, and changes in the landscape. Microtopias transform the world by making policed boundaries more permeable.

If utopia resides nowhere, microtopias emerge everywhere. If utopia suggests perfection, microtopia defines adaptation. If utopia is remote, microtopia mesmerizes. Utopias never change; microtopias never stay the same. Tactical, temporary, disruptive, distilled, microtopias show us how to inhabit the world in a better way. Ephemeral and transitory openings, microtopias map the realm of the possible, an invitation to live in a shared world. Rather than a grand narrative and a large scale, microtopias propose temporary, dynamic, shared worlds, a field of forces shaped on a sustainable scale.

Distributed Microtopias seeks projects that run across distributed networks like the Internet to provoke and educate from remote locations on a sustainable scale, that expand knowledge rather than contain it, and that invite participation and exploration, and that unhinge familiar habits of thinking to envision new possibilities for historical and cultural clarity.

Enrico Aditjondro of EngageMedia (Indonesia) will serve as the juror for the competition with FLEFF Digital Curator Dale Hudson of New York University Abu Dhabi (UAE/USA).

Please send submissions with a brief bio in an email to distributed.microtopias [at] gmail.com no later than 15 August 2012. The exhibition is scheduled to go live in September 2012.

The Associação Cultural Videobrasil in partnership with Casa Tomada (São Paulo, Brazil) and Delfina Foundation (London, UK) are pleased to invite applicants from Brazil and the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia (MENASA) for a three-month artistic residency split between São Paulo and London. The aim of the residency is to produce a new work in response to Videobrasil’s Collection.

The Videobrasil em Contexto Prize (Videobrasil in Context) is focused on artists, under the age of 35, whose practice involves a strong element of research. Artists must be interested in the archive and collection as a point of departure for their work. Two artists (one from Brazil and another from MENASA) will be selected based upon their proposed projects to participate in a three-month residency split between São Paulo and London from mid-September 2012. The works developed during the residency will become part of the Videobrasil Collection.

The collection available for each artist includes the works that have been part of the Southern Panoramas show since the Festival’s 8th edition (1990), when Videobrasil focused on the geopolitical South, as part of its mission to research, foment and promote the artists from the places which have been traditionally bordering and outside of the main art world circuit. This Collective offers a group of very different artworks, including the production of the 90s and 2000s and a wide variety of artistic languages, subjects, discourses, and intentions. From immersive contact with this Collection, the selected artists will develop their projects. An overview on this 20+ year selection (featuring artists list, short bios, works description, video excerpts, film stills, and other information) is available for the applicants through the Videobrasil Online page.

Along their six-week at Casa Tomada in São Paulo and at Delfina Foundation in London (from September until December 2012), the artist will work in a collaborative environment that will include critical accompaniment through discussion meetings, texts, and/or activities provided by other artists, curators, critics, or guest professionals invited by the organizers. During their stay in London, the artists will present their projects, their research processes and works of their choosing from the Collection to be shown publicly. At the end of the residency, the artists will be asked to prepare a presentation of their projects to be part of the activities of the Festival’s 30th Anniversary in October 2013. The resultant research will also form part of a digital publication.

The initiative continues Videobrasil’s policy of promoting and giving visibility to art produced in the geopolitical south, as well as Casa Tomada and Delfina Foundation’s commitment to fostering artistic development. The residency takes place in the context of 30 years of International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil and aims not only to bring visibility to its important collection of video art and performance built over the past decades, but also to the production of critical and conceptual creative contributions around these works.

On this practical and theoretical workshop with Anna Dumitriu, participants will begin to learn how to work safely with bacteria as an artistic medium using commonly available supplies. They will start to develop a bacteriocentric view of the world, understand the textile techniques used in the exhibition and discuss the new advances in clinical microbiology being investigated by the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project. The workshop will also look at other key artists in the field of bioart, issues of public engagement in science, ethics, and the nature of collaborative art/science practice.

Turbulence.org is the oldest and most consistent net art commissions site in the world. Now celebrating 16 years it has commissioned, exhibited and archived over 200 works. We are also in the process of archiving the collection at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. You can read about the project in Virtueel Platform Research: Archiving the Digital by Annet Dekker and Rachel Somers-Miles.

Please support this inspiring and important project! Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is a line of mesh networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence. The project is focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. The Autonets garments, when activated, will alert everyone in range of the the local mesh network who is wearing another autonet garment that someone needs help and will indicate that person’s direction and distance. More here.

The Alaska Design Forum (ADF) is looking for an Civic Media Artist to join a group of social artists and scientists participating in our upcoming initiative ReLocate. ReLocate is a collaborative initiative that develops venues for listening, solidarity, and engagement with the villages of Kivalina and Shishmaref in Northwest Alaska. Collaborating group members and community partners will design these venues to be launched during a two week gathering in the villages from August 21st to September 4th of 2012.

Participating social artists and scientists include the Finnish architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, Alaskan anthropologist Ann Fienup-Rioridan, the social artist group Wochenklausur from Vienna, and an interdisciplinary team of graduate students from the California College of the Arts Social Practice Workshop. This is a beginning, the ADF is shaping a context of intentions and building an infrastructure of cultural support. We imagine that concrete agendas and goals for these venues will develop through conversations between the civic media specialist, their collaborators, and community members before and during our visit. The ADF will host a symposium at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center for the review and discussion of ReLocate on September 7, 2012.

The ADF is an arts and design non-profit based in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, Alaska. We develop platforms for exploring relationships between local cultures, politics, and place in the state of Alaska.

We are looking for individuals who have experience with the following:

- The development of culturally specific and situational platforms that respond to local information sharing needs.

- Collaborating with community members and multidisciplinary partners. You will work closely with Wochenklausur and community delegates in the months leading up to our visit, and during our time in the villages, to find appropriate online solutions for supporting and expanding project goals.

We imagine that these venues will be designed to locate:

- The social, political, and environmental context of issues surrounding village futures.

- Opportunities for non-governmental partnerships and spaces that foster them.

- Information sharing venues for the amplification of individual and consensual village voices and a community generated understanding of place.

- A sense of locality defined by local notions of identity, worldview, and ways of life.

Please see text below for further discussion and project context.

ReLocate
Alaska Design Forum
2012

ReLocate is a collaborative initiative that develops venues for listening, solidarity, and engagement with communities in Northwestern Alaska. Here sea levels are rising and permafrost is melting, entire villages risk falling into the sea. Isolated communities of around 400 people are facing imminent relocation and the need for viable futures is urgent. Until recently, material practices, notions of identity and ways of life were intimately linked to place, independence, and tradition. Today, Native Alaskan political history has determined the emergence of corporate and governmental agencies as cultural stakeholders. The conquest of consumerism and the fading of traditional knowledge force a growing dependence on products and routines of the cash economy. This sociopolitical context is tangibly reflected in the character of the built environment and material culture: locality continues to wash away with the rising tides of standardization and outside ideals.

With an estimated quarter of the world’s undiscovered energy resources, disputes over tribal sovereignty, strongholds of indigenous practices and knowledge, and one of the most dramatically changing climates on Earth, the North faces significant economic, social , and political speculation. There is a need to address the future with urgency and sensitivity but there is little evidence of a holistic vision beyond economic efficiency and expediency. In Alaska, existing relocation plans from the Army Corps of Engineers are limited to a study of material logistics, engineering in response to site conditions, land ownership, and siting demands related to subsistence practices. Planning efforts have failed to include an interdisciplinary dialog about alternatives that includes participants from the social arts and sciences and supports community leadership. Proposed construction is standardized and expensive. For Kivalina, a village of about 400 people, estimates range between 200 to 400 million dollars. Funding is short and efforts have stalled.

ReLocate builds online and face to face venues for solidarity and engagement between community members from the relocating villages of Kivalina and Shishmaref, visiting social artists and scientists, governmental and corporate stakeholders, and a global network of empathetic collaborators. These are persistent, community activated, evolving venues collaboratively imagined to locate: the social, political, and environmental context of issues surrounding village futures, opportunities for non-governmental partnerships, information sharing venues for the amplification of individual and consensual village voices, and a sense of locality defined by local notions of identity, worldview, and ways of life. We are in pursuit of opportunities that can support locally specific and independent village futures. Subsequent platforms, supported by the ADF and its partners, will be for the response to these opportunities through collaboration, education, and design. ReLocate participants, working with communities and each other, toward the design and introduction of these venues are: the artists group Wochenklausur, Civic Media Specialists, Alaskan anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan, and Finnish architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa.

PLATFORM3 - Spaces for Contemporary Art is a unique, progressive art location in Munich. Since March 2009 it has been offering space for local as well as international exhibitions and discourse projects. It is a production location as well as experimental field for artists, young curators and culture managers.

In the summer of 2012 PLATFORM3 is organizing a series of events on the topic of occupying strategies in art. Besides lectures by experts and panel discussions, there will also be a screening on the topic of art in urban space.

Occupying is no longer exclusive to Wall Street, but has spread across the entire globe as a “silent” expression of protest. Between the cornerstones of politics, society and business, the Occupy movements mark a new way of practicing democracy in the public arena. These have now made their way into the sphere of art, as can be witnessed most recently by the Occupy protests at MoMa New York, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi or the Pirate Camp Venice.

Yet what effects does this occupying have on artistic forms of expression? Is this establishing a new, artistic aesthetic of criticism? How is art taking up public space? How is it influencing urban or social infrastructures by doing this? With BESETZT, PLATFORM3 would like to get to the bottom of all these questions. Therefore the Call for Videos is being issued to ALL city strollers who have discovered something special on this topic in their city. The submissions should focus on the urban, public surroundings, in the sense that artistic occupying strategies create interfaces with the everyday, thereby yielding new perspectives. These insights into various cities and countries illustrate the most diverse strategies with which art and creativity occupy their space.

How: The submitted videos will be compiled into a ca. 60-minute projection, which will be premiered in the main exhibition space at PLATFORM3 on July 11, 2012. All submissions selected for the film will be mentioned by name in an accompanying publication. One chosen author will receive 150 as well as space for a text contribution in the publication.

Those interested should send the original video with a film trailer (author, title, city) by June 01, 2012 to contact [at] platform3.de

Please include a short description (max. 300 words) of the city and the type of artist occupation being filmed.

Also see:

PLATFORM3 2012 : SEE (TO) IT - A QUEST FOR ARTISTIC PRACTICES TO INCLUDE THE VIEWER

JANUARY 01, 2012 TO DECEMBER 31, 2012

In all our 2012 projects, PLATFORM3 attempts to break apart the widespread theory of the passive spectator – not through preprogrammed participation, but rather through various strategies of making public the genesis of a project. In this way the audience is no longer an unpredictable variable appearing at the conclusion of the artistic production process, but an integrative component of every artistic project – whether exhibition, performance or lecture series.

The “fourth wall” exists in theatres, and in museums works are separated from visitors by barriers, vitrines and security guards. Strategies – both spatial and symbolic – to overcome the barriers to the viewer shape the 20th and beginning of the 21st Century: artists as well as institutional agents and curators actively seek an encounter with the audience, even if this does not always take place on an equal footing or under egalitarian conditions.

The viewer, respectively the audience, is and remains the unpredictable variable in every artistic project: with the selection of specific artistic positions, or names of curators as well as by means of the exhibition context, it is possible to anticipate the perception of the audience to a certain degree. In the face of the artwork, however, the individual, the actual exhibition visitor remains incapable of being influenced – and is in advance unreachable. How they approach the work, with which means they grasp it, is always an experiment. Works, according to French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, can also be read against the intention of the author. This is especially true for all contemporary art which is dedicated to more experimental, aesthetic forms and that breaks from the genre principle.

Would it not therefore be interesting to include the audience right from the very beginning? From the very conception of the project, to generate interest in the public, to seek an exchange with those who will later appear behind the fourth wall, behind the barriers, as a visitor?

However, the general direction of art during the modern period is – surprisingly – initially the opposite: with the increasing professionalism of artists as well as through the structural organisation of the “artworld” (P. Bourdieu, A. Danto) as a relatively hermetic system, little by little the spectator is ousted from the production context. Through strategies of participation and relational aesthetics (N. Bourriaud), the viewer is now increasingly making a comeback once again.

The return of the viewer is, however, not what it seems: the viewer, according to Jacques Rancière, was never physically or intellectually ‘absent’. In fact viewing is not a strictly contemplative moment. Someone who sits in a chair and follows an artistic act is not automatically behaving in a passive way. So perhaps viewers do not have to be freed from their apparent rigidity through emotionally charged messages and offensively formulated invitations at all. On the contrary: Seeing is always an active, individually shaped act to perceive and analyse reality. From the entirety of his impressions and associations, references and experiences, the observer construes his/her most personal visual experience. Limiting it to viewing is not sacrificing the analysis of meaning. In the opposite way, the imperative of taking part does not guarantee the active involvement of the viewers with what is happening.

Participation takes many forms – participative art projects are simply the most obvious, most widespread of them all today. In all PLATFORM3 projects in the year 2012 the viewer as individual, and the audience as the entire public, is therefore the origin of an artistic idea, not just its target.

Deep Thought V.2 is an artificial intelligence machine, a futuristic fortune teller who uses Twitter as its memory center, from which extracted phrases to communicate in random and poetic way with its environment. Deep Thought analyzes brain signals with galvanic sensors, understanding moods from the variation of current in the skin. It then uses this information to generate searches inside its Twitter memory to find and select phrases to communicate.

Wanted tweets #dtv2: We seek people who share their deep thoughts, micro-poems, micro-philosophy and derivatives. This will help us to extend the memory of our fortune teller, poet, thinker, futurist, machine. Just add hashtag #dtv2 in your tweets.

Web Biennial 2012 (Wb12): OCCUPY CONTENT: Have we reached the end of the Internet as we knew it? :: Open Call — Deadline: June 15.

The last few years threats over the openness and the democracy of the medium have significantly augmented. With the introduction of the new Internet censorship laws on the name of intellectual property, increasing government surveillance and control under the pretense of security and continuously evolving systems of data aggregation applied by companies, the Internet territory seems to be doomed to a fatal change. No matter to which extent the new agreements will pass, how different governments and countries might react, and how companies might cooperate according to their own interests, insecurity and fear cast their shade over the Internet’s freedom.

Can networks survive with the restrictions and inhibitions being imposed to them? Can they withstand data disclosure and control? While these questions remain open, the voices rising up multiply, arguing that the internet ultimately can not be regulated and controlled. As every power feeds its counterpower and every mechanism of control, its anti-mechanism, structures can be opposed and transformed by the potentiality of resistance by millions of users around the world.

Believing that collaborative creative processes can formulate new common grounds of participation, Web Biennial 12 wishes to address a call to all creative netizens, seeking for different alternatives that can be offered.

Not only web based and net based projects but ideas, statements, platforms and tools are also welcome; as well as anything that could contribute to an open platform which aims to assist in building a free network of networks beyond control…

We will beam Twitter discussions from participants worldwide towards GJ667Cc — an exoplanet 22 light years away that might support earth-like biological life. Anyone with an Internet connection can participate during two performance events, which will simultaneously take place online, at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2012, New Mexico), and in the stars. By engaging the millions of voices in the Twitterverse and dispatching them into the larger Universe, Tweets in Space activates a potent discussion about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders or understanding. It is not just a public performance; it performs a public.

We will collect all Twitter messages tagged #tweetsinspace and transmit them into the cosmos via either a home-built or borrowed communication system. Our soon-to-be alien friends will receive scores of unmediated thoughts and feedback about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything in between. All tweets will also be streamed to a live public website, where they’ll be permanently archived, as well as projected - as animated twitter spaceships towing messages - at the Balloon Museum and planetarium-like digital dome (IAIA), in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Your donation will help buy equipment for us to build our own open-source transmission system, upgrade an existing one through partnership with another institution, and/or time with one of the world’s extant high-powered communicators. Any funds above our goal will pay for a better system, or go towards online coding, design, and promotion. RocketHub is not an investment or charity. It is an exchange: funds from fans for rewards from us: both the ability to send Tweets into Space, and then some. It’s an All & More funding mechanism for us: if we don’t reach our financial goal we get to keep what we raise. But if we do reach our goal, we get access to exciting opportunities.

Tweets in Space asks us to take a closer look at our spectacular need to connect, perform and network with others. It creates a tension between the depth and shallowness of sharing 140 characters at a time with the entire Internet world, in all its complexity, richness and absurdity, by transmitting our passing thoughts and responses to everywhere and nowhere. These “twitters” will be stretched across all time and space as a reflection on the contemporary phenomenon of the “status” updates we broadcast, both literal and metaphoric.

Code is the invisible force at the heart of contemporary digital media and games, routinely obscured by the gadget fetish of breathless tech marketing and scholarly focus on more visible social and technical interfaces. A recent wave of critical new media studies has focused attention on the complex politics of interaction and subjectification in online and videogame spaces, from the re-conception of the online prosumer as a form of consensual user labour and parallel debates regarding ‘playbour’ in the context of modding and participatory game culture (Kücklich 2005), to the critique of the growing corporate interests that now control and mandate a major section of the games industry and the web.

Concurrently, media studies has been reinvigorated by new approaches in software studies and platform politics. Software studies explores the processes of software and its deep interweaving with contemporary culture, analysing how the logics and materialities of algorithms, codes and data seep into and (re)build everyday life. Platform politics is a growing field of net theory that seeks to understand the specificity of the apps and portals that are becoming the dominant means of access to digital media today, which is often constrained to stratified and proprietary forms.

What these recent interventions and emerging approaches share is an emphasis on interrogating the material conditions, formal characteristics and technical specificity of contemporary media – taken together, they provide a strong impetus to go even deeper, to the underlying logical and technical architecture of the digital. The time has come to bring code out into the open.

And yet code is not inherently tied to the contemporary games and media apparatus. Implying both process and product, code can be defined in at least two distinct but complementary ways. On the one hand, code is an underlying technical process, a set of rules and instructions governing, for instance, the permutations of all those 0s and 1s obscured behind user interfaces in the case of computer code. But a code is also a cultural framework navigated and understood socially and performatively, which similarly governs action and interpretation at the semiotic level of communication and representation, as is the case with legal, social and behavioural codes.

As both a technical process and an operative principle, code’s significance thus extends far deeper and wider than its manifestation in particular technological assemblages, such as its current digital incarnation. Code permeates all aspects of society, now and then; from codes of conduct and practice to institutional orthodoxies, from semaphores and ciphers to digital hardware and software, from linguistic codes to legal codes and copyrights. This conference will explore code in all its diversity, as a simultaneously material and semiotic force that operates, often by stealth, across the wider cultural, social and political field, with a particular emphasis on media, games and art. We thus seek to understand the aesthetics and politics of code in tandem, and the way in which the political is increasingly controlled and disrupted through the design and programming of software and platforms.

The conference theme is also an opportunity to reflect on how, as academics and creative practitioners, we often participate in but can also challenge the disciplinary and institutional codes that can arbitrarily separate these conceptual and disciplinary domains. CODE will be a transdisciplinary event that brings media studies, media arts and games studies into dialogue through individual papers, combined panels, master classes and an included exhibition.

THEMES

We welcome all submissions that engage with any aspect of code in all its diversity. The following themes are intended as prompts for reflection and engagement, but do not exhaust the kinds of discussion and debate that a detailed consideration of code generates.

Code and the in/visible

Here, we follow Wendy Chun (2004: 27) in asking, how is it that “the computer – that most nonvisual and nontransparent device – has paradoxically fostered ‘visual culture’ and ‘transparency’”? In other words, how it is that code – the operative logic, the executive power of computing – has become invisible? Chun argues that software, operating at the level of screen and interface, obscures the constant workings of code, which become opaque to ‘end-users’ – an argument even more dramatically stated in Friedrich Kittler’s (1997) claim that ‘there is no software’, or rather than software is a simulation which conceals the true locus of computing: hardware. Along with Matthew Kirschenbaum’s critique of media studies’ ‘screen essentialism’ (2008: 34), or preoccupation with formal appearance, such debates perhaps suggest that the ‘participatory’ or ‘interactive’ nature of networked new media is a fallacy, and that they are instead bound up in various forms of control (Galloway 2004; Galloway & Thacker 2007; Chun 2011).

We invite submissions that consider the various technical, ideological and academic aspects that thus work to obscure code, both digital and otherwise. Does the mystification of code operate analogously to ideology as Alexander Galloway (2006) and Chun (2004) argue, or is code ideological in itself? How might post-structuralist considerations of cultural codes illuminate these contemporary debates? Papers that explore the ways in which code is hidden are thus welcome, but moreover so are those that focus on how it is made visible. That is, what are the ‘thresholds of materiality’ (apologies to James Murdoch) at which code is exposed? Code’s invisibility be breached via the aesthetic strategies and accidents of glitch and error, for instance, but also through programming activism, DIY coding and game exploits, as well as a range of other measures.

Failures of code

Certainly, much of the power of code lies in its invisibility, a transparency that leads to a socio-cultural embedding as the ‘common sense’ of everyday life. But what happens when code fails, socially, culturally, politically or technologically? What happens when someone, or something, refuses to obey the rules? Comedy, subversion, disruption and even revolution all find their origin in their failure to adhere to certain codes. Such disturbances are informative precisely because they highlight the fragility and artificiality of the taken for granted, and we therefore welcome contributions that explore such failures across both technical and cultural fields.

Security codes

Though code often serves to secure and obscure control and authority, it remains vulnerable. Hackers both compromise and contest the integrity of networked information, communication and entertainment environments. Systematic phone hacking by News International journalists in the UK stands alongside interventions into global affairs-of-state by Wikileaks to set the scene for rethinking established media codes of practice. Similarly, hackers associated with Anonymous have paved the way for new forms of software-based protest and agitation. In a different context the games industry has been shadowed by a history of hacks and cracks: for example, the recent compromise of PS3 console security for both ‘homebrew’ and piracy purposes, and the massive breach of Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) in April 2011 that resulted in data theft from 77 million users. These seemingly disparate situations signal the inherent vulnerabilities of data and code. They raise the spectre of a whole new form of risk society operating at the level of code and through its breaches and accidents. We welcome submissions that call into question the relationship between control, security and forms of hacking across media, gaming and other digital contexts.

The deeper history of code: analogue and digital

‘As sequences of signals over time,’ Kittler notes, ‘[codes] are part of every communications technology, every transmission medium’ (2008: 40). Whilst code today is overwhelmingly figured in terms of the digital, code as a principle of information exchange extends far beyond this contemporary manifestation. As such, we invite submissions that consider the critical role of encoding and decoding throughout the history of media and communications technology. In particularly, we welcome media archaeological excursions into the prehistory of digital code: what are the resonances or links between ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of code? Can the emergence of various coded communications systems be traced back to a common source, perhaps the military-industrial complex? How do systems such as Morse code, semaphore, cryptography and cybernetics relate to computing? and how does the logic of code seep into everyday life through various technical and biopolitical regimes? Similarly, what is the theoretical and operative relationship between the ‘codes’ and rules of non-digital and pre-digital games and contemporary video games, in terms of their linguistic, behavioural and social codes? How might concepts such as protocol (Galloway 2004) and unit operations (Bogost 2006) offer us a way into these considerations?

Code and other laws of media

In any given context, multiple technical and cultural codes frame action, and this situation raises questions about the continuities and discontinuities of various codes. Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) presciently argued that digital code, as instantiated in technical protocols such as digital rights management, may disastrously overextend the limited protections of copyright and intellectual property as dictated by legal codes. In doing so, Lessig called attention to the incongruity or contradictions of different codes as they come into contact. Similarly, we invite submissions that explore the way in which different codes meet, overlap, extend and contradict one another. In particular, we welcome consideration of these issues from the perspective of copyright, intellectual property and distribution and analyses of what happens when the digital reproduces, alters or fails to approximate legal, social, behavioural and other such codes.

Code and public/private

Contemporary media theory argues that emerging forms of socio-technical practice reconfigure the public and private spheres to produce what has been called ‘public privacy’ (Senft 2008; Boyd 2010; Lovink 2011). This term gestures to the ways in which subjects use public signifying systems, such as social networking sites and the diverse media forms of celebrity production or reality programming, to articulate highly personal messages. Yet such rhetorical strategies are not unique to distributed digital platforms. After all, the eighteenth century epistolary network, often called ‘The Republic of Letters’, was responsible for reformulating the public and private domain (Goodman 1994; Cook 1996). We invite submissions that respond to the questions generated by these intersections between public and private, historical and contemporary. For instance, what are the historical, legislative, technological and cultural settings for the emergence of a public privacy? Does the ‘intimate public sphere’ (Berlant 2008) obscure women’s political and cultural agency? And after Haraway (2007), to what extent does the @ sign and other networked avatars function to locate meaning, destination and geopolitical identity?

Code and agency

Interactive media, games, art and cultural practice can all deal with the relationship between the interacting participant and the coded system. What aesthetics and politics are at work when the participant’s presumed agency and the coded constraints are in tension? Topics for consideration include the aesthetics of code-based media; interfaces; participant experience; emergence/counter-play; proceduralism and performativity.

Bodies in code

Whereas early cyberculture theorists dreamed of a virtual reality freed from the constrains of materiality, more recent theory demonstrates the centrality of embodiment and the material to media both old and new (Hansen 2006; Munster 2006; Milne 2010). For this conference, we ask not only how interfaces and devices, but more specifically information and code, reconfigure various bodies – social, political, corporeal – and vice versa. Relatedly, how might we conceptualise the materiality and ontology of code – flat, folded, linear, or otherwise – in relations to phenomenologies of embodiment and new or ‘vital materialism’ (Bennett 2010)? And what is the connection between fantasies of information as liberated, immaterial data and dreams of disembodiment (Hayles 1999)? And are mechanistic principles such as genetic code the only resort for understanding how bodies get into code, and code into bodies?

Recoding the disciplines

Code is also what we live out as academics and creative practitioners, in terms of the disciplinary and institutional frameworks and regulations that often constrain us but can also occasion new forms of connection. In the context of media studies, media arts and games studies, we are particularly interested in asking how these closely related disciplinary formations account for the conditions of their existence and distinctiveness. At the same time, nascent approaches and debates such as software studies, platform politics, digital humanities and computational methodologies might provide a common ground from which to begin transdisciplinary work. We invite submissions to consider, exclusively or in passing, some of the questions the notion of disciplinary codes raises:

- What ‘common codes’ might media, media arts and games share and at which points do they depart?
- What epistemological and methodological insights might they contribute to one another?
- What aspects of their disciplinary code might exclude certain forms of inquiry or subject areas?
- Can we ‘transcode’ media, art and games, as cultural and intellectual objects, or should they remain distinct?
- What are the theoretical and methodological tools needed to ‘transcode’ these disciplines?

CREATIVE WORKS

The CODE conference incorporates an exhibition of creative works that respond to the artistic challenge of code and the themes outlined above. Code operates, as if by stealth, beneath the materiality of networked media performances, software art, games, mobile apps, locative and social media. But code also presents artists, performers and creative practitioners with opportunities to construct innovative hybrid media forms that can extend our understanding of contemporary art practice. From video installations in the 1960s, through to sophisticated interactive media and augmented reality applications, artists have arguably been at the forefront of innovation, adopting the language of the computer to forge new creative frontiers. We invite contributions that examine the creative potential of code, including but not limited to, the implications of code for contemporary art/ists, code as art and/or performance, code as avant-garde, virus and anti-art.

REFERENCES

For works referenced above and a further readings related to the conference themes please view the ‘Reading List’ tab above.

The first conference of its kind in the UK to disseminate a spectrum of digital arts linked with the Somatic, this event will integrate advanced critical and theoretical perspectives. Through keynote presentations, papers, roundtable discussions led by keynote speakers, a series of workshops and an art exhibit, the conference offers the opportunity for both practical and theoretical understanding of its theme.

Nancy Stark Smith will be conducting The Global Underscore Event, an annual event during which dancers at many sites around the world practice the Underscore simultaneously.

U P D A T E S & N E W S I T E M S

A special issue of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Intellect Press will publish a peer-reviewed edition of the proceedings. Eds. Prof. Sarah Rubidge and Dr. Andrea Davidson. Publication in 2013.

The Fonlad Festival, in its 8th edition aims to celebrate Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, proposing as global theme “Performing Acts”. It seeks to present a body of work that has at its core the record of performances (artistic or not), the body in its many cultural meanings and poses, the registration of events / actions, works that have as a theme or center, the body , their move(s), desire(s), anxieties(s), either in the form of video art, video performances, photography or web art.

You are invited to apply for a place in the 2012 Session of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa). The 2012 Session, Futures of Nature, is part of a drive within the humanities to reframe the disciplines and critical theory in light of the environmental emergency that is said to endanger most species on the planet, including our own.

We will reflect on some of the major challenges relating to the contemporary conditions and the long-term sustainability of life on Earth. Ours is an age characterized by the indelible imprint of human activity on the Earth’s climate, its geology and its conditions – a process which may lead to the planet’s becoming inhospitable to human life. It is also an era that blurs the distinction between human history and culture and the Earth’s natural history and material composition.

We will reflect on a position long held by environmental activists, but now demanding urgent political and intellectual attention, that humans are a species alongside other species, one whose survival is threatened by its own behaviour. If to survive the ecological crisis means to work out new ways to live with the Earth, then a different mode of humanity is required. The extent to which these new modes of humanity are prefigured in contemporary arts, technology and aesthetics will be assessed.

The JWTC was founded in 2008 as a place for experimenting with theory in the global South. Our goal is to open questions that are fundamental to contemporary aesthetic, philosophical, political, literary, ethnographic and ethical inquiry – questions that potentially point to new paths for critical theory at the interface of local and global circuits.

Our audience is a new generation of local and international scholars who locate their work beyond the model of area studies; are willing to challenge naturalized conventions of interpretation and are eager to bring about a renewed dialogue among the disciplines with a view to a transformed critical theory landscape.

The 2012 programme will span ten intensive days of lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions and performances. It will also include explorations of Afropolitan Johannesburg.

We encourage to apply both faculty, postdocs and senior post-graduate students in the humanities, social sciences and critical studies in law, media, health, ecology, technology, design, architecture, urban studies and the arts. We also encourage applications beyond the academy in cases where applicants have a strong interest and capacity for social theory.

The deadline for applications is March 25, 2012. Admissions to The Workshop are announced on April 5, 2012.

Tuition fees have been broken down in sliding categories in order to insure a financial scheme that accommodates global resource inequities.

The privileging of human existence as determining the actual and possible qualities of both thought and being has been the object of philosophical critique. So too have been the nature/culture divide and the opposition between an instrumentalist attitude towards nature and what has been taken to be the ‘nature worship of the primitive’.

Yet skepticism – a belief/doubt dualism – seems to still plague ecological thought. A discourse of limits, ecological critique has become a target for appropriation by opposed and contradictory political positions. All of these raise larger epistemological questions concerning the final knowability of nature and the extent to which we can access it directly. How do we extricate ourselves from the skepticisms tugging at (if not produced by) the schisms between faith, belief and doubt? What would a rethinking of the humanities, critical theory, architecture, city planning, the arts, or knowledge itself look like beyond the subject-object dualism that separates humans from plants, animals and objects? Is a different mode of humanity possible – a mode that would render us newly constituted beings in a newly constituted world?

Oil, capital and democracy

As a growth-consumption machine, capitalism is impossible to reconcile with finite environment. Today’s global economy is deeply dependent upon, and embedded into, cheap oil and natural gas. Western industrial democracies and countless other political regimes are built around the plentiful production or supply of oil and gas which power virtually all movement of people, materials, foodstuffs and manufactured goods, and indeed capital itself. As threats to oil suppliers rise, Western powers have been prepared to resort to more extreme measures in the name of securing supply: technologically, fracking (hydraulic fracturing) enables deeper drilling but at increased risk of uncontainable deep sea leaks and heightened occurrence of earthquakes in areas unrelated to tectonic plates. The 2012 Session will explore the histories of capital and democracy in terms of the changing natures of nature and the forms of energy consequently available to it at any given historical moment.

Catastrophes and disasters

Catastrophes and disasters have usually been thought of discretely as either natural or socio-political events. While the catastrophic character of politically prompted events – genocidal wars, ethnic cleansing, epidemics, etc. – are often analogized by naturalistic representation., large ‘acts of God’ have been rationalized as being beyond the socio-political. But this distinction is fast being undone, bringing to ‘catastrophe’ an older critique of the impossibility of separating the natural from the cultural. How do we account for the dramatic speeding up of the rate of change in natural processes when the time lines of nature are converging with those of society in a mutual lockstep? To what extent does the apocalyptic force us to grasp the collective through its possible extinction, or to think the world through our absence? How would a future in which humans have disappeared look like? How will the thoroughgoing deterioration of the Earth and of nature signal the end/reformulation of social and political forms?

Bio-extraction and bio-wealth

One of the most salient questions in contemporary life is how the biological is being given new forms, denominated, stored, accumulated and turned into new forms of property. The genome of plants, animals and micro-organisms are now transformable and transactable in ways that were heretofore unimaginable. Bio-banking itself is increasingly directed at human DNA, human tissue, human embryos and human stem cells. As debates about patenting life itself rage, a new round of bio-extraction is under way. We will assess recent challenges to conceptions of nature, biology, technology and life and inquire into the extent to which new developments in life-science produce new possibilities of exploiting nature.

Alternative economies and the urbanization of nature

The cumulative threat to humanity and the Earth arises from the existing relations of production; from the ways in which products are consumed or wasted and how surplus is appropriated and distributed. The 2012 Session will reflect on what “alternative economies” might look like and how a commons might be produced and sustained. What are currently the kinds of economic activities and modes of consumption that offer possibilities of livelihood and well-being beyond the global purview of growth and boundless consumption inherent to capitalist rule? If the concept of “community” is to be extended beyond the human species, how can “the economy” be represented as a tangled space of negotiated interdependence between humans and non-humans?

Furthermore, the ecological crisis and the enlargement of the scales of territorial design are requestioning the project of urbanism, the future of architecture, landscape and infrastructure design and the relations between design, life sciences and the natural world. In the age of climate crisis and natural resource scarcity, what novel options for urban design and urban living are worth considering? What experiments are currently under way in art, technology and aesthetics to face down the conditions of degradation and disaster?

I am looking for artists whose work looks critically at any issues surrounding the internet. These works need not be net art, but they must be available online in order to participate. This work could fall under the rubric of ‘post-internet’ art or ‘internet-aware’ art, but this project leaves that kind of terminology to be self-defined by the artist and does not itself assume those labels.

Web Rings were popular in the early days of the consumer internet. People with like interests banded together to form a ring of sites. Each web page in the ring would have a button marking them as a member and connecting them to the next, last, and a random page within the ring.

As part of my own process of reconsidering 90’s web practices, I’d like to revive this old format. The Meta Cyber Arts Web Ring will constitute a community of artists linked together directly — without Google, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, or galleries. It will be a system of mutual support among artists as well as defining a particular moment in art practice in relation to the web.

To be included, please send an e-mail to faholland [at] gmail.com with a link to your website as well as a short e-mail about why you feel your work fits. Please note, this is an inclusive process and everyone that sends me an e-mail will be included in the web ring.

Once I have a group of participating artists together, I will distribute code to include on the main page of your website.

If you’re interested in helping coordinate this process by contributing code or graphics, please also let me know.

This workshop is an exploration on how to use code to simulate phenomena found in nature. Introducing concepts of physics and mathematics in a computer environment with Processing, we set up a simulation of particles with different interactions from scratch. Part of the exploration is to see how to integrate these tools in an aesthetic context to give dynamic movement and emergent behaviour to visual objects.

Benjamin L. Sanchez: BA Mathematics and Computers and current master’s degree in Quantum Chemistry. Is dedicated to exploring the application of mathematics and computing in different contexts, such as 3D reconstruction from images placentas, planning of drinking water networks, synthetic biology, the search for chemical compounds and the computational tools music.

26 and 27 from 19:00 to 21:00
28 and 29 from 12:00 to 14:00 16:00 to 19:00
Registration Cost: 80 €

Turbulence.org is the oldest and most consistent net art commissions site in the world. Now celebrating 16 years it has commissioned, exhibited and archived over 200 works. We are also in the process of archiving the collection at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. You can read about the project in Virtueel Platform Research: Archiving the Digital by Annet Dekker and Rachel Somers-Miles.

Cynetart is an international festival for computer based art in Dresden. The 16th Edition of the festival will present an exhibition of the winning projects and selected competition entries, first-class performances and a programme with live sets of international electronic musicians and VJs at the Festspielhaus Hellerau and other selected spots in Dresden.

The competition is open to artists, designers and scientists who dedicate themselves in their artistic and reflective discussion in particular interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. The international Cynetart competition accompanies the festival every two years. The competition offers some of Europe’s most prestigious prizes in the field of media art.

The following prizes will be awarded:

Förderpreis der Kunstministerin des Freistaates Sachsen in the amount of 10,000 EUR, in 2013 realization of a project,

Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project is an introverted performance exploring the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori or ‘shut in’ syndrome. Over one week, Eugenia Lim will live in a bedroom-style installation within West Space (Level 1, 225 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Vic, 3000). Although physically ‘on view’ to gallery goers, communication between herself and the outside world will occur via a web portal or ‘hiki-site’ through which everyone is invited to chat and participate in the project from their own networked phones, computers and lives. Without leaving the space or receiving any visitors, Lim will rely on the kindness of others for food and survival.

STATEMENT

I, Eugenia Lim, will retreat from physical society for one week.

I will stay within the four walls of the 5m x 5m back-space at West Space gallery, never going outside. I will not speak to anyone or receive any visitors.

I will bring in only essentials, including objects for a digital life. I will post an inventory of all items on the hiki-portal before I enter the space.

For nourishment, I will bring in only water. I will depend on the kindness of strangers and the local community for my food and survival.

Gifts are welcome, otherwise all media and entertainment I consume will not take a physical form: everything I watch, listen, play and read will be via the internet, including Henri-Louis Bergson’s Time and Free Will (there is no negation in duration).

I will post an updated inventory of all items collected at the end of my week.

I will be on view from 6pm on Thursday 22 March until 6pm on Thursday 29 March 2012. Gallery hours are Wed - Fri 12-6pm and Sat 12pm-5pm. Online viewing during this time will occur via live-captured stills 24/7.

I invite the networked world to participate via the hiki portal www.stayhomesakoku.com from the 22nd March 2012.

Data Is Political brings together artists, designers and scientists to discuss such questions as: What are the aesthetic, ethical and spatial dimensions of information and its relation to power, the production of knowledge, and the construction of urban spaces? Speakers include Philippe Rekacewicz, Peter Sunde, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Max Van Kleek, and Daniel van der Velden with contributions from Steve Dixon, Michelle Teran, and Jill Walker Rettberg. The event is organized by Amber Frid-Jimenez and Ben Dalton.

Radical increases in computing power and speed together with the rhetoric of openness and organizational transparency have led to a desire to read, visualize and make sense of vast and expanding archives of digital information from financial data and government documents to global sporting events and personal video collections. Corporations storing unprecedented archives of data on their servers have called on artists and designer to lead efforts to visualize this information, producing new opportunities for designers to use their skills on problems of seductive complexity. Often such initiatives are framed as promoting the public good. But the act of storing, structuring, manipulating, visualizing and distributing can both reveal and conceal the underlying structures and global networks to which the data refers. Far from value neutral, the act of visualizing information occurs within a complex and contentious field of competing agendas. Simply put, data is political.

Over the past fifty years, artists and designers have developed tactics that explore, remix and interrogate cultural archives as products of carefully constructed, state controlled systems of knowledge. Artists and politicians understand the value of these knowledge productions and use them as opportunities to challenge the organization of — the rules of access to — and methods of distribution of this cultural data. This symposium will bring together artists, designers, engineers and political scientists who have developed critical practices related to information and the politics that they produce. The symposium asks: How does the scale of expanding databases affect the creative practices of artists and designers working within public or private sectors? What strategies do designers and artists use to negotiate the competing aims of agencies with a stake in the information that is represented?

Data Is Political will be held from 10am to 6pm on March 15, 2012 at the Bergen Public Library and will be followed by a reception at ROM8 Gallery in conjunction with On Balance, an exhibition by Ellen Røed and Christian Blom. Please visit dataispolitical.net for a full program and a link to a live video stream of the event.

Data Is Political is developed as an interdisciplinary event at the Bergen National Academy of Art & Design in collaboration with the Jan van Eyck Academie, and the University of Bergen. The symposium has received generous support from the Verdikt programme of the Norges Forskningsråd, the KHIB Research Council, and the KHIB departments of Design and Fine Art.

Purple Blurb is pleased to announce the start of our Spring Semester series next week with noted sound poet, book artist, and visual writer Steve McCaffery. We hope you will join us for this and our future events, which include a reading by Christian Bök, a symposium on the future of books, and an open mic /open mouse for all forms of digital writing!

A central figure in Canadian avant-garde writing, Steve McCaffery’s work spans sound poetry, generative and iterative text, experimental prose, performance art, literary criticism, and visual poetics. A member of the Four Horsemen sound poetry ensemble and a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo, he is the author of over a dozen influential books of poetry, twenty chapbooks and four volumes of critical writing. His works include the visual typewriter poem CARNIVAL (pictured above) panels 1 and 2, Panopticon, The Black Debt, North of Intention and Rational Geomancy: Kids of the Book-Machine (with bpNichol). With Jed Rasula, McCaffery edited Imagining Language, an anthology for MIT Press.

Please join us for an open mic featuring D1G1T4L WR1T1NG for a variety of platforms, from immersive projections by Ari Kalinowski to generative fiction for the iPad by Alexandra Chasin. Bring video art, interactive fiction, SMS poems, and any form of electronic literature you’ve got up your sleeve!

Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By (FC2), and Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (St. Martin’s). She teaches Writing at Lang College, The New School. Ari Kalinowski runs the Intermedia Poetry Project.

May 3 in 6-120, 6:00 pm :: CHRISTIAN BöK, Author of Crystallography, Eunoia and The Xenotext; Professor of English, University of Calgary (Co-sponsored by the Visiting Artist Series).

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut, and Eunoia, a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each chapter, which won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and is the best- selling Canadian poetry book of all time. He is also author of Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (2001). His latest project, The Xenotext, encodes a poetic text into bacterial DNA that will produce proteins in response — yielding another poetic text. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon.

The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Writing and Humanistic Studies. The organizer for the 2011-2012 academic year is Amaranth Borsuk.

Since the early 1990s, there has been a growing body of live performance that is situated online. These events differ enormously in form and content, are described with multiple terms (such as cyberformance, remote performance, internet theatre, screen stage, computer-mediated performance), are staged in a variety of online environments (such as text-based and graphical chat rooms, sound broadcast, real time choreography for screen, virtual worlds, games and purpose-built or existing platforms as for instance facebook) and engage diverse audiences. The net, however, is forgetful: it loses the memory of those events, and of the people who lived them, of the environments and communities who hosted them.

On 12 October 2012, a symposium will be organized by UpStage, where cyberformers will discuss their online performances with other artists, researchers and interested participants. Questions we would like to tackle in CyPosium include: What different kind of events happened? What did they make possible? What was special about the event? Why were things done in a certain way and what were the results?

We invite proposals for presentations about past online performances. Presentations will be programmed into 30 minute timeslots, should be no longer than 20 minutes in duration (10 minutes will be scheduled for questions) and can be done in the Upstage platform (or in another platform if you wish). Presentations could involve webcasting, showing archives, talks, etc. A public chat will be available for interaction between the artists and audience. There will be facilitated discussions between programmes of presentations, to enable general discussion around common themes. Everything will be recorded for archival and documentation purposes.

If you are interested, please submit:

a short bio;

a short abstract of your presentation (not more than one page) including the platform you wish to use and any relevant information;

one image that represents this past work;

contact email and postal address.

Proposals must be emailed to cyposium [at] upstage.org.nz by 15 of June 2012.

You will receive news of the CyPosium acceptance by the end of July and the CyPosium schedule will be announced in September.

Please note that technical and general support will be provided for presentations in the UpStage platform; if you wish to use a different platform, you will need to provide your own support.

Athens Video Art Festival, always faithful in experimentation and constant self-criticism as contemporary art and life prerequisites, welcomes 2012 with its eighth official edition. AVAF extends an open invitation to artists who are interested in developing their ideas by experimenting on the platform of new technologies, under no thematic restrictions, in 7 categories:

For precise information and submission forms whoever interested can visit the official website of the festival.

Athens Video Art Festival (AVAF) is an annual digital arts and new media festival taking place in Greece, mainly Athens. Being part of an international art network, it reflects a wide range of ideas and developments in the art world.

It aims at bringing together experimental projects of contemporary artists and at promoting free expression, exchange of ideas, and creative interaction while exhibiting new media and new technologies application in arts.

Through a variety of creative forms, it presents alternative ways of ‘viewing’ urban landscape and of perceiving art, and new codes of interaction between art and contemporary societies.

The fields of Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR) seek to interactively mix virtual media with a person’s perception of the physical world around them. Whether interactively combining physical and virtual objects and environments in 3D, or reacting to location or other aspects of a users context, these paradigms enable fascinating new types of user interfaces, and are beginning to show significant impact on industry and society. The field is highly interdisciplinary, and MR/AR concepts are applicable to a wide range of applications. Since 1998, ISMAR and its forerunner events, IWAR/ISAR and ISMR, have been the premier forums in this vital field.

ISMAR 2012 now invites contributions to a range of categories for the the Arts, Media and Humanities (AMH) program:

The 2012 ISMAR Arts, Media and Humanities (AMH) program invites artists, designers, and scholars to explore the potential of Mixed and Augmented Reality. Artists and designers are invited to present and contextualize creative work in MR or AR media forms and to reflect on the place of these technologies in various fields of art and design. Scholars are invited to present work that analyzes or critiques AR/MR in the contexts of current social forms or the history of art and media. We welcome papers, posters, and demos, as well as proposals for panels and workshops.

Topics of interest include Mixed and Augmented Reality works in relation to, but not limited to:

Instances from and reflections on the dual rise of the digital humanities and the digital arts: to include panels, workshops, and roundtables as well as the performance and presentation of literary, musical, and visual works. Proposals accepted singly or as pre-organized panels. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Digital Humanities and Digital Arts: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How
• The History and the Future of the Digital Humanities
• The History and the Future of the Digital Arts
• The Theory and the Practice of the Digital Humanities
• The Theory and the Practice of the Digital Arts
• The Intersection Between the Digital Humanities and the Digital Arts
• Making Connections Between the Digital Humanities and Film and Media Studies
• Making Connections Between the Digital Arts and the Fine Arts
• Connecting Work by Archivists, Curators, and Librarians with Faculty and Student Work
• Curricular & Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Humanities
• Curricular & Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Arts
• Exploring the Genealogical and Geospatial Aspects of Applied Digital Humanities and Digital Arts
• Making Connections Between Data Mining and the Digital Humanities
• The Relationship Between Metaphors of Computer Science and Metaphors of Humanities and Arts
• Alternative Academic Careers in the Digital Humanities and Digital Arts
• Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity in the Digital Humanities and Arts
• Copyright and Digital Rights Management
• The Challenges of Digital Archiving
• Mass Digitization and Its Potential for Scholarship in the Humanities

Julia Flanders is the Director of the Women Writers Project and the Associate Director for Textbase Development in the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. She also serves as the Vice President for the Association for Computers and the Humanities. She has published work in journals including Computers and the Humanities and Pedagogy, and in edited collections titled Electronic Textual Editing (MLA, 2006) and Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minnesota, 2012).

About WPI:

Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a highly selective private university located one hour west of Boston. WPI was founded in 1865 to create and convey the latest science and engineering knowledge in ways that are most beneficial to society. WPI’s founding motto of Theory and Practice continues to underlie our academic programs. WPI graduates emerge ready to take on critical challenges in science and technology, knowing how their work can impact society and improve the quality of life.

For this issue of Transformations, we invite papers that consider the gamut of change that the Internet has provoked, drawing on Marcus Breen’s Uprising: the Internet’s Unintended Consequences (Common Ground Publishing, Champaign, IL, 2011).

In Uprising Marcus Breen employs Walter Benjamin’s arguments about art as a ‘politicising instrument … to allow for the proletariat to speak for themselves’ (p. 30). Following this assertion, we would like to invite contributors to submit papers that reflect on this claim, to support, challenge or deeply interrogate it. Discussions could include analysis of the ways the Internet enables the ‘proletariat’ and the abject to speak for themselves (following Julia Kristeva, Neil Larsen, Judith Butler, Arthur Kroker and others). The creation of new styles of false consciousness is open for discussion. Does the Internet require a new kind of speaking, one which does not fit older forms of class discourse? And what role does art, if any, play in this speaking? Can the Internet be understood as a new media tool offering emancipation given the political economy of the media in general? Are there lessons to be learned about proletarian political mobilisation due to the Internet after the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street? Discussion about the meaning of ‘proletarianisation’ in the Internet era could take up the interpretive work Breen offers on the new definition of the term in an era when cultural ’stuff’ is largely unregulated in a neo-liberal context.

Shifts in the circulation and availability of otherwise regulated media differ from nation to nation and geographical region to region, suggesting that proletarianisation due to the Internet takes a multiplicity of forms. The implications for political mobilisation may offer unprecedented opportunities for political action across the spectrum. Questions about the challenges to the order of liberal democracy abound and are welcome from either theoretical or empirical case study perspectives or in innovative multidisciplinary modalities.

Abstracts (500 words): due 1st May 2012, with a view to submit articles by 1st September.

Abstracts should be sent to: The General Editor, Warwick Mules, at w.mules [at] bigpond.com

Translating E-Literature is organized by OTNI: Objets textuels non identifiés (UTO: Unidentified Textual Objects), a research project into the evolution of textuality in the digital age. It is supported by the Electronic Literature Organization.

E-literature is an emphatically global phenomenon. Its authors are of many different nationalities. Sometimes they write in a form of global English. The reception of E-literature nevertheless raises issues which are far from being exclusively discursive in nature. It also involves criteria that are visual (screen display, graphics, color…), dynamic (screen animations) or kinetic (reader/ players’ actions and movements). These dimensions extend far beyond the competences traditionally required of readers of literary works on paper. They are often highly culture-specific. A new semiotics, a new rhetoric and a new poetics are needed if the analysis of these aspects of E-literature is to progress properly. It is impossible to translate works of E-literature without paying detailed attention to them. Thus, translation does not simply provide materials for research into E-literature. It is a research activity in itself – a form of theoretical practice.

The conference will explore a wide range of questions concerning the translation of works of E-literature. It welcomes proposals relating to:

globalized English and vernacular languages;

transposing screen displays from one culture to another;

the cultural specificity of dynamical figures;

technology and gesture in local cultures;

digital technology as a medium of translation and/or transformation;

…

The conference is open to proposals formulated in terms of poetics, rhetoric or semiotics but also to issues raised by cultural studies and science and technology studies; to theoretical discourse as well as experimentation in and analysis of actual translations; to studies of works in which translation between languages or transpositions effected by technology constitute a literary strategy…

Translation workshops will form part of the conference. Participants are invited to suggest innovative formats to enable these.

The conference will stage a multilingual program of E-literature.

The conference proceedings will be published online. They will include textual contributions and videos of the translation workshops. Experimental translations of E-literature will also be featured.

Researchers and practitioners alike are requested to send a 500-word abstract and a short bibliographical resume, before March 15, to the following address: translatingelit [at] aol.fr

Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB) is an international series of one-night exhibitions inviting artists, armed with films and projectors, to convene and explore the art of projection in an immersive environment of moving light, sound and performance.

VIVID and Flatpack Festival presents Bring Your Own Beamer Birmingham, curated by Antonio Roberts and Pete Ashton. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to beam your work into the nooks and crannies of VIVID’s Garage space.

WE NEED YOU!

Do you have a projector? And an original video work (by that we mean a film you made/ have permission to screen)? If so, BYOB Birmingham needs you! You’re invited to submit films to be considered for inclusion at Birmingham’s first BYOB event on Friday 16 March 2012.

Participants will be required to provide their own laptop or DVD player, and a projector (it can be analogue or digital). Participants are responsible for their own equipment at all times.

If you’d like to submit a film for consideration, please complete the online application form, located here.

Online journal Hz is looking for articles on New Media, Sound Art, Electro-Acoustic Music, Virtual World/ Machinima and Social Media. We accept earlier published and unpublished articles in English.

Hz is published by the non-profit organisation Fylkingen">[www.hz-journal.org] in Stockholm. Established in 1933, Fylkingen has been known for introducing yet-to-be-established art forms throughout its history. Nam June Paik, Stockhausen, Cage, Stelarc, etc. have all been introduced to the Swedish audience through Fylkingen. Its members consist of leading composers, musicians, sound artists, dancers, performance artists and video artists in Sweden.

Now entering its fourth year, Low Lives is an international festival of live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues throughout the U.S. and around the world. Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. These networks provide a new alternative and efficient medium for presenting, viewing, and archiving performances. Artists working in any media are invited to submit proposals for live performance-based works.

Selection Process:

Each Presenting Partner (see list below) will follow their curatorial process to select one performance to take place at their venue. In addition, 36 artists will be selected from artist proposals responding to this Call for Artists, and will be invited to present their work across the Low Lives network. These performances will be transmitted through the internet from a location of the artists’ choice. The Selections Committee will be comprised of Directors and Curators from Presenting Partner institutions and Low Lives’ production team.

Artists selected to participate in this exhibition will be instructed on how to transmit their performance through a live online broadcasting network. Performances will be projected in real time across the Low Lives 4 network of Presenting Partners and venues. The exhibit will also be available for online viewing, both in real time as it unfolds across political boundaries and time zones, and on the Low Lives website after the event.

A full-color catalog and companion DVD with information and an image for each participating artist will be produced for Low Lives 4 after the exhibition takes place. Artists interested in participating in Low Lives 4 are encouraged to visit www.lowlives.net to view previous Low Lives exhibition catalogs and performance videos.

In an effort to allow the Low Lives platform to include as many artists as possible, artists who participated in Low Lives 3 are not eligible to participate in Low Lives 4. Artists who participated in Low Lives 1 and 2, and in Low Lives: Occupy! are eligible to participate in Low Lives 4.

Born in Morelos, México, Jorge Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. He uses traditional and new media, as well as performative elements to investigate communication systems and the effect of technology on artistic production, social structures and communities. Rojas’ work and curatorial projects have been exhibited internationally. In 2009, Rojas founded Low Lives, where he currently serves as Director, Producer, and Curator.

Co-Producer

Chez Bushwick, an artist-run organization based in Brooklyn, is dedicated to the advancement of interdisciplinary art and performance, with a strong focus on new choreography. Since its inception in 2002, the organization has been acknowledged as a new model for economic sustainability in the performing arts, offering $8/hour subsidized rehearsal space, and thereby fostering the creation, development, and performance of new work. Chez Bushwick is also responsible for a number of performance programs that encourage artistic freedom, collaboration, and creative risk-taking.

Co-Producer

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Juan Obando received a BA in Industrial Design with a minor in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. In 2005 he started the ongoing BZC Media Corporation Project (an international art unit based in Bogotá, with cells in Venezuela, USA, and The Netherlands,) and has subsequently been exhibiting throughout The USA, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia, Colombia and Venezuela. His work has been selected twice for Colombia’s “Salon Nacional de Artistas” (2008, 2010) and reviewed by different international publications. After receiving an MFA in Electronic and Time-Based Art from Purdue University, Juan currently works between Colombia and The USA and holds a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Elon University in North Carolina.

Co-Producer

SPREAD ART is an artist-run creative incubator designed to foster new works through collaborations with artists and curators from around the world. SPREAD ART supports emerging artists through group and solo exhibitions, music events, and performance showcases. SPREAD ART provides opportunities for all kids and adults to explore their creativity and increase self-awareness through art. SPREAD ART assists artists and arts organizations to begin new art events or evolve existing events in their community. SPREAD ART looks forward to hearing how we can support your creative endeavors.

The 10th edition of the HTMlles will take up the notion of risk. To risk: to gain or to lose (it is uncertain), to expose oneself to a possibility… Risk is a potential. Whether used positively or negatively, the idea of risk implies that of evaluation, action and distribution, and thus, power. While the term “risk” evolved with the development of capitalism, the concept of “risk society” is about twenty years old and has been used by scholars to describe how modern society organizes around the idea of risk, that is, in response to a future (which society should be able to manage). By simply invoking or imagining the future, one immediately engages in risky behaviours. Anything and everything can become risky… Indeed, there exists a global economic and industrial complex organized around monitoring and moderating “risk”, from insurance companies to investment products, as well as technologies and approved, standardized methods of risk assessment and risk management. There are also whole sets of techniques of calculation, “optimization” and social control that rely on the presence of a notion of “risk,” from so-called “at-risk populations” to who are considered “vulnerable,” “suspect” or, increasingly so nowadays, “insolvable.”

In such a critical moment, it is perhaps crucial to ask (ourselves) some questions. How does the language of risk articulate itself today? What is at risk today? How can one take risks today? What are the different levels of risk in our various (trans)actions? What is the relationship between risk, technology and power? How is risk both managed and created? How is it distributed? Since when does one “invest” in one’s future and what does it actually mean? Do “crises” serve to pacify the communities being affected by these “crises”? Who are they? What do artists have to say about these so-called risks and crises? How is making art risky today? Who speaks? To whom and in the name of what?

The HTMlles 10 welcomes project proposals from self-identified women, trans and gender non-conforming artists of all origins on the theme of risk, as well as proposals for risky projects…

The HTMlles is a feminist festival of media arts and digital culture produced in Montreal by Studio XX, a bilingual feminist artist-run centre for technological exploration, creation and critique. Initiated in 1997, the HTMlles is an international platform dedicated to the presentation of women’s, trans and gender non-conforming artists’ independent media artworks from all facets of contemporary technological creation, including but not limited to: digital storytelling, cyber art, short film and video art, audio and electronic art, radio art, installation, locative media, 3D animation, game art, augmented reality, electronic publishing, design, bio art, public interventions, community-based practices, performance and interdisciplinary practices.

The HTMlles 10 will be a multi-sited festival, which includes Studio XX’s new gallery space, the XX Files radio show, .dpi electronic periodical and Matricules online feminist archive. RISKY BUSINESS will be co-presented with several partner artist centres (to be announced) that focus on either (or both) media arts or feminist practices, in Montreal. Participants receive honoraria.

OPPORTUNITY FOR EMERGING CURATORS: The current call is also open to project submissions by
self-identified emerging curators.

To submit a proposal to the HTMlles 10, please follow the guidelines and email it to: festival (at) htmlles (dot) net

Undertaking Transmodern: At the Threshold of the Present Moment :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: April 1.

The Transmodern Performance Festival cordially invites you to submit scores, ideas, images, essays, plays, poems, parlor games, recipes, instructions for a performance, etc. for a publication on the theme of TRANSmodern. This publication will work as a collection of musings on the state of being “trans” (as in transcendent, transgressive, translated, transmogrified, transgender, transient, etc.) in today’s cultural and political landscape. We are attempting to define and expand upon these concepts through variant media and disciplines. By approaching these fascinating and complex theories from an array of diverse fields and methods we will more adequately represent the multifarious nature of these theories. The Transmodern Performance Festival is constructing a publication which considers its topic not solely through authoritative textual statements but through the visual and the musical — the questioning and the suggesting.

Submissions:

The book will be a full color, perfect bound book with essays, drawings, paintings, recipes, scores etc. Please consider subverting and inverting these guidelines and expand upon the very premise.

The Transmodern Performance Festival is a cultural phenomenon presenting radical, experimental, expectation-defying work from local, national and international artists. The festival represents communities and artist who defy cultural normative practices and disciplines. In 2013 we will expand the performance festival to include this publication to be released at the tenth annual Transmodern Performance Festival.

Join The Craigslist Revolution! Bashar Al-Assad Is Looking For A Job! Joseph Delappe has posted an ad on the Reno Craigslist. It reads:

“I am Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria and Regional Secretary of the Ba’ath Party. The circumstances of my current employment may soon be coming to an end, therefore I am looking for a new job! I will consider all offers of temporary and/or long-term employment. I am especially interested in working abroad. I am expert in all aspects of despotic rule, including torture, general corruption and fixed elections (in the 2007 referendum I received 97.2% of the vote!). While my experience has been resoundingly in the nepotistic dictatorial sector, I would also consider accepting work as a babysitter, dog-walker, prison guard or stand-up comedian. Anything really. My hobbies include crochet, charades and angry birds. References available on request!”

Please re-post this ad to your local Craigslist by March 11 and email the url to Delappe: delappe [at] unr.edu

During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software and computers. This is now changing as the figure of the hacker, together with the ideas and practices associated with this figure, are spreading to new walks of life. Thus we are reminded of the origin of hacking in hardware development.

Some notable examples of how hacking is spreading to new areas include open hardware projects, the flourishing of garage biology, and the creation of hacker/ maker-spaces in many cities around the world. The wider importance of this development is suggested by the role played by Japanese hackerspaces in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident. The hackerspaces were instrumental in informing the public, campaigning the government for access to data about contaminated areas, and building easy-to-use equipment for measuring radiation.

These activities bring to mind one of the classic case studies in the STS canon - the Cumbrian farmers herding sheep in the shadow of the Sellafield nuclear power plant. Some of the themes discussed in the Sellafield case and in the STS field as a whole, such as lay expertise and radical openness in information management, are actualised anew with the expansion of hacker practices. Still, until now, the figure of the hackers has rarely been made into an object of sustained interest in fields outside software and new media studies.

In this panel we would like to gather papers with empirical studies of biohacking, hardware hacking and related practices. We also encourage theoretical pieces discussing what the social sciences might contribute to the study of hacking, and what theoretical challenges the figure of the hacker might pose to the study of scientific and technological innovation. Some questions which might be asked in the light of this development include, but are not restricted to, the politics of hacking, the creation of the collective identity of the hacker, how development projects are managed, how the line between the community and firms is negotiated, the diffusion of hacker practices in corporate innovation models, and the legal implications of these practices.

Practical information

All submissions must pass through the official submission system at the 4S site. (see [4sonline.org] for all details on submitting your paper). Deadline for submissions is 18th of March. Session proposals should be limited to 250 words total, and should contain a theme and a rationale for the session, and a brief discussion of its contribution to the STS community. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organisers of this panel: Johan Soderberg (johan.soderberg at sts.gu.se), Alessandro Delfanti (delfanti at sissa.it), Eric Deibel (ericdeibel at yahoo.com).

Decode/Recode: Celebrate 100 Years of Alan Turing: We invite you to collaborate in a globally networked interactive event to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, as part of the official opening of the University of Salford building at MediaCity on 23rd March 2012. As part of this significant event we will be connecting for 24 hours with 24 partners worldwide for a live digital media jam.

Alan Turing’s accomplishments made a fundamental impact on the development of the computer and to our contemporary networked digital culture, and we would like to invite your students and staff to collaborate, on this live global digital media performance.

The Media City foyer and its high definition video wall will act as the hub, receiving and sending content across the world to our international partners, using five high-resolution video wall displays each with their own input. There will be live interactive performance with sound, animation, interactive drawing, poetry, video, motion graphics, virtual environments such as Second Life, collaborative screen sharing, interactive interfaces and playful environments.

During the day the international partners will broadcast content resulting in a live media jam.
The University of Salford at MediaCity will be the central node receiving ‘coded’ content from other partner nodes and decoding and recoding this content, passing it on to the network of partners, forwarding, sending it back or distributing it further.

The combined media art and conference event is a critical and inclusive project that addresses the use of interactive media in art and everyday use. It combines a reflective attitude with an active approach and it is transversal in that it goes across institution profiles, production formats and consumption segments. The scope includes conferences, workshops, featured keynotes, video programs, installations and performative works. re-new / IMAC is always looking for persons and projects that help steer and scrutinize the vast and ever-expanding realm of contemporary culture.

The overall theme for re-new / IMAC 2012 will frame cybernetics in the un-controlled/-controllable organizations that penetrate and immerse contemporary mankind and society. Interaction, autonomy, innateness, emergence, meta materials, self-construction and -organization are among the factors that contribute to the field.

Proposals

Proposals of maximum 2 pages can be made for full papers, posters and demos in these categories:

(Norbert) Wiener Classic

Cybernetics and (urban) politics

Bio-cybernetics

Interactive media art – towards a ‘third order’?

Artworks

Artistic submission are accepted in all categories relevant to the event theme, with special emphasis on interactive media art forms - performative, installation, participative, collaborative, distributed in sound/ music, visual, haptic and cross-media.

This symposium and performance laboratory will bring together an invited group of international theatre, performance and sound artists, musicians, digital artists, art theorists and researchers engaged in creative practices that reflect on major innovative performance traditions of the past century and their impact on current performance knowledge and physical (or physical-digital) techniques.

The Artaud Forum promotes opening up the concept of performance research, and continuing last year’s intertwined approach to physical and conceptual exploration of practice, it emphasizes the relevance of experimental treatments of actuality — of forms of collaborative creation — that may take us beyond the perspectives and protocols of established academic or artistic inquiry. Even as we turn to technologies of performances this year, artistic and conceptual criteria will be significant, and we have chosen expressive inter/ relations — “konnecting gestures” as the focus of the 2012 workshop — gestures as practice that is at once aesthetic, corporeal, technical and political.

The lab will offer a series of parallel modules investigating the relations between choreography and software, sound and motion-design, movement capture and 3d digital/virtual environment navigation, light and projection architecture, dirty electronics, hacking and interactive programming.

The symposium and workshop are composed of dialogue and performance practice, intermixed with film screenings and a hands-on electronics and wearable design workshop as well as live coding sessions in the digital performance studio.

The “Workshop Words,” as the late Kazuo Ohno called reflections on practice, are published online on our ArtaudForum website and links to performance films/documents will be made. The full program of workshops, roundtables, keynotes, exhibitions and concerts will be published soon.

This event is programmed by the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance and supported by the Brunel School of Arts and Brunel University Graduate School.

BADco.’s workshop is a part of LABO21 - European Platform for Interdisciplinary Research on Artistic Methodologies, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

The Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance has its own TV CHANNEL on dance-tech.net, and will broadcast selected events/performances live from the Artaud Performance Centre.

The partnership between the Center and dancetechTV is an experiment in collaborative video broadcasting. The channel allows worldwide 24/7 linear broadcasting of selected programs, LIVE streaming and Video On-demand, and is enveloped within dance-tech.net, a donation based platform.
For a parallel research context of our explorations of gesture, see the extra-institutional “Performance Academy” formed jointly between Interaktionslabor and XMLab.

This symposium and its topic are a continuation of BADco.’s artistic interest to relate performance and image. More concretely, it was motivated by our most recent work Responsibility for Things Seen that was presented in 2011 within the Croatian participation at the Biennale di Venezia. The work required us, in the absence of performers in the six-months exhibition, to pursue the idea of ‘theater by other means’ and to custom develop a database video system that unfolds a particular nexus of body, image and technology.

Who can apply: If you are a scholar or practitioner working on the nexus of performance, image and technology, if you are working in or between any number of fields such as, but not exclusively: performing arts, visual arts, cinema and expanded cinema, human-machine interaction, technological performance, architecture, neuroscience, we are inviting you to present your research interests in form of a presentation and/or participate in the debates at our symposium Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating.

When and where: The symposium will take place on 16-17 March 2011 in Zagreb, Croatia. The artistic programme will start on the 15th.

What is the topic: With “Actionable Image” we propose to explore the experimental encounters between the image and the body — two modalities of organized materiality, agency and receptivity affecting each other, two modes of expression whose encounters in our age are predominantly arranged, composed and mediated by means of visual technologies.

We tend to subscribe to the critique of the domination of image and the scopic regime: the unebbing repetition of hegemonic representations, the homogenization of mediatized social experience, the habituation of sensory apparatus to technological artifice. However, understanding the encounter of image and body as a field of performance allows us to explore this encounter beyond the adequation of sensory perception to technological apparatus, of social behaviors to reproduced images. A mis-encounter where incompatibilites between technology and habit, excess of agency on the side of image or on the side of spectators, interventions in the transmission process, strange situations of viewing emerge, that encounter becomes an indeterminate field of negotiation, slippage, misperformance, deterritorialization and reterritorialization… In short, a field of divergences that are themselves frequent subject to experimentation in art.

With this other scene of image in mind, we calls for contributions that will bring their analysis to bear on situations of problematic spectating, strange apparatuses and dispositifs of viewing, agency of images, strategies of performing images and other issues relevant to the nexus of body, image and technology.

The symposium and attendant artistic programme will include a.o., contributions by artists and scholars such as Jonathan Beller, Maaike Bleeker, Vlatka Horvat, Stephen Zepke and BADco.

What are the keywords: performance and image, performed image, image in performance, image and corporeality, agency of image, actionable image, algorithmic cinema, image and interface, iconicity of image, apparatuses and dispositifs of viewing, cinematic viewing vs theatrical viewing, image and presence/ absence…

How to apply and when is the deadline: We are looking for contributions of various formats, including but not limited to papers, short presentations, demonstrations and participation in the debate, up to 30 minutes in length. If you want to participate in the symposium, please send us a short note stating your topical interests, discussion points, format, etc. and a short description of your background. While we cannot cover your expenses, we can help you find convenient travel arrangement and affordable accommodation, and we will do our best to address your interests and provide an insightful debate.

All proposals should be sent in by 10 February 2012 to: tom at badco.hr.
You’ll be notified of our decision shortly thereafter.

Publication: A special issue of Frakcija Performing Arts Journal will accompany the symposium. We are looking for contributions of those taking part in the symposium, but also others who cannot join us in Zagreb but are researching the topic in academic or artistic formats. Articles, essays and artist’s page(s) proposals will be considered. The submission deadline is March 2, publication June 2012. All proposals (and any questions on submission) should be sent to: ivana at badco.hr

The symposium and attendant artistic program are organized in collaboration with Multimedia Institute/MAMA and the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom/WHW.

The symposium Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating is part of LABO21 – European Platform for Interdisciplinary Research on Artistic Methodologies, a partner project of BADco. (Zagreb), BUDA Arts Center (Kortrijk), Laboratorium (Antwerp) and University of Circus and Dance (Stockholm). With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

In the coming issue we wish to focus on political geographies, as well as artistic interventions in, and reimaginations of, such geographies. The distinction between “place” and “space” is of particular interest, as it is fundamental not only to much art, but also to our global situation within neoliberal political geography. If time has come for us to reimagine this geography, as well as the interrelationships between, and definitions of “space” and “place”, is it thinkable that art could be an ideal site for such reimagination?

The construction and exploitation of a particularism of the local also seems indigenous to the logic of neoliberalism, in the sense that it relies on the opposition between place and space to be able to expand in the first place. Among other things, the space-place dichotomy facilitates the reduction of developmental issues, political unrest or violence to irrational expressions of local misguidance, backward culture or belief systems. When the evolution of neoliberal space is merged with democratic and civilizing pretentions, the otherness and fixed specificity of places appears to be a legitimate pretext to expand into always new (potentially profitable) areas in and beyond the periphery.

The self-fulfilling prophesy of neoliberal geography also constitutes an effective impasse in alternative visions of political geography –- on the one hand, by making the critical reconstruction of place and its interconnectedness with a larger picture, beyond the dichotomies of space/place and local/global, superfluous -– on the other, by dissimulating any locally based meaning of universality that cannot be reduced to the civilizing prospects and ideals of neoliberal universalist geography. In this sense, the self-upholding myth of the local which neoliberal geography feeds on seems to express another form of orientalism, convincingly presenting itself and its worldview as the necessary cure to global and local problems, and reversely; presenting political issues in localities beyond its borders as a temporary void in its over-arching, inescapable logic.

Contributors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds are invited to submit articles, exhibition reviews or interviews that address the theme “Reimagining the political geography of place and space”, through a high variety of possible angles.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

Artistic approaches to political geography, artistic intervention in geopolitical discourses and decolonization strategies.

The concepts of space and place in art, and their renegotiation through art.

The role of art and artists in the rewriting of history and political geography in post-colonial situations.

The relationship between neoliberal political geography and orientalism.

The art biennial as a global phenomenon, and its role in the (re)negotiation of political geography.

The relationship between the global art scene and neoliberal political geography.

We accept submissions continuously, but to make sure you are considered for the upcoming issue, please send your proposal, CV and samples of earlier work to us within February 10, 2012.

Completed work will be due March 5, 2012. Commissioned works will be translated into Norwegian and published in a bilingual version.

Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics is a bilingual English and Norwegian quarterly, which investigates the possibilities of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation.

Theory in Action, the journal of the Transformative Studies Institute (quarterly publication print ISSN: 1937-0229 electronic ISSN: 1937-0237), is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, whose scope ranges from the local to the global. Its aim is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and the discussion of current research (qualitative and quantitative) on the interconnections between theory and action aimed at promoting social justice broadly defined.

The journal editorial board does not privilege any particular theoretical tradition or approach and there are no word or page limits for its articles. TIA publishes papers that connect academic scholarship with activism, what R.K. Merton calls ‘theories of the middle range.’ TIA values radical and unconventional ideas, expressed in different styles, whether academic or journalistic.
TIA is interested in how theory can inform activism to promote economic equality and create democratic political structures. TIA seeks to promote racial, ethnic, and gender equality as well as resistance to all forms of injustice. TIA will only consider manuscripts that are well-written, innovative, and fit the Institute’s mission. Drafts and poorly written or formatted manuscripts will not be considered.

404 International Festival of Art & Technology has been awarded by “Fondo Nacional de las Artes” (National Arts Founding) for the production of the ninth season, which will be organized in different phases throughout 2012.

404 Festival launches an open call destined to artists and researchers from all over the world with the aim of spread and stimulate new media creations.

The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference seeks papers that explore the theme of ‘Interference’ within practices of contemporary image making. Today we’re saturated with images from all disciplines, whether it’s the creation of ‘beautiful visualisations’ for science, the torrent of images uploaded to social media services like Flickr, or the billions of queries made to vast visual data archives such as Google Images. These machinic interpretations of the visual and sensorial experience of the world are producing a new spectacle of media pollution. Machines are in many ways the new artists.

The notion of ‘Interference’ is posed here as an antagonism between production and seduction, as a redirection of affect, or as an untapped potential for repositioning artistic critique. Maybe art doesn’t have to work as a wave that displaces or reinforces the standardized protocols of data/messages, but can instead function as a kind of signal that disrupts and challenges perceptions. ‘Interference’ can stand as a mediating incantation that might create a layer between the constructed image of the ‘everyday’ given to us by science, technological social networks and the means of its construction.

The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference wants papers that ask:

Can art interfere with the chaotic storms of data visualization and information processing, or is it merely eulogizing contemporary media?

Can we think of ‘interference’ as a key tactic for the contemporary image in disrupting and critiquing the continual flood of constructed imagery?

Are contemporary forms and strategies of interference the same as historical ones? What kinds of similarities and differences exist?

Participants are asked to address at least one the following areas in their abstract:

Expanded image

Remediated image

Hypermediacy

Expanded film

Imaging science

Computer Vision

Networked Image

Immersion

Proposals

You are invited to submit an abstract for an individual paper relevant to the conference theme as described above. The deadline for abstracts is March, 2012. Abstracts for individual papers should be no longer than 250 words. Please provide full contact details with your abstract.

Refereeing of papers will be done by members of an expert review panel (to Australian DEST refereed conference paper standards). All selected peer reviewed papers will be published in the online conference proceedings.

National Institute of Experimental Art, College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales; Victorian College of Art, University of Melbourne,.

Conference Sponsors

Australian National University, Curtin University, Deakin University; Monash University; Queensland College of Art, Gold Coast Griffith University; Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, Swinburne University; University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Technology Sydney, University of Wollongong.

Albion College and the city of Albion, Michigan seek artists and designers to submit work for consideration for a virtual public art exhibit to launch the first annual Albion A.R. Art Walk. This Augmented Reality competition will feature sculptures digitally overlaid in Albion’s Reiger and Victory Parks from April 22 through May 17, 2012.

Up to 20 works of art will chosen from around the world for this inaugural year of the Albion A.R. Art Walk. Albion College and the Virtual Public Art Project (VPAP) will launch a series of site-specific virtual artworks throughout the city of Albion to be viewed via VPAP’s free Layar App for most iPhone and Android smartphone devices.

Artists and designers interested in submitting work for this project should refer to the guidelines listed below.

Preliminary Guidelines for submitting work:

1. Artist name
2. Artwork title
3. Artwork subtitles (for inside Layar, if applicable)
4. Artist statement or short description of work
#1-4 should be in a word doc or PDF
Artwork image or illustration (jpeg @ 200dpi for printed promotion)
5. Link to artist’s website (if available)
6. Artwork
Submitted 3D files should either be a .l3d (Layar) format or .OBJ with attached .mtl file
All textures must be PNG or JPEG and square (512×512 is ideal)
Animated textures are allowed and must be saved as a PNG with attached .mtl file
MTL files MUST link to the attached texture files
3D models must be sized when created to the same size they will appear in real world space
7. All work and supported material should be placed in a folder and named with the Artists’ name

Submissions should have “Albion AR” in the subject line contact [at] virtualpublicartproject.com

The Embroidered Digital Commons is a collectively stitched version of A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons by the Raqs Media Collective (2003). The project seeks to hand-embroider the whole lexicon, term by term, through workshops and events as a practical way of close-reading and discussing the text and its current meaning.

Would you like to stitch the Digital Commons with us?

Furtherfield invites all gallery visitors to take part in one or more of our Saturday morning embroidery sessions and come together to stitch the term ‘Meme’ from the lexicon for the Digital Commons,
chosen in relation to the theme Being Social. A cultural ‘meme’ is the way in which an idea spreads through social networks.

We are inviting crafters, programmers, artists, makers, and people interested in working collaboratively, or taking part in participatory projects to each stitch a few words of the term meme, as described below. The resulting patches will then be turned into a short film depicting the sequence of embroideries.

Meme

“Meme: The life form of ideas. A bad idea is a dead meme. The transience as well as the spread of ideas can be attributed to the fact that they replicate, reproduce and proliferate at high speed. Ideas, in their infectious state, are memes. Memes may be likened to those images, thoughts and ways of doing or understanding things that attach themselves, like viruses, to events, memories and experiences, often without their host or vehicle being fully aware of the fact that they are providing a location and transport to a meme. The ideas that can survive and be fertile on the harshest terrain tend to do so, because they are ready to allow for replicas of themselves, or permit frequent and far-reaching borrowals of their elements in combination with material taken from other memes. If sufficient new memes enter a system of signs, they can radically alter what is being signified. Cities are both breeding grounds and terminal wards for memes. To be a meme is a condition that every work with images and sounds could aspire towards, if it wanted to be infectious, and travel. Dispersal and infection are the key to the survival of any idea. A work with images, sounds and texts, needs to be portable and vulnerable, not static and immune, in order to be alive. It must be easy to take apart and assemble, it must be easy to translate, but difficult to paraphrase, and easy to gift. A dead meme is a bad idea.”

About the Project

In 2003 the Raqs Media Collective wrote A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons. The full lexicon is an A-Z of the interrelationship between social, digital and material space. It weaves together an evolving language of the commons that is both poetic and informative. The terms of the lexicon are: Access, Bandwidth, Code, Data, Ensemble, Fractal, Gift, Heterogeneous, Iteration, Kernal, Liminal, Meme, Nodes, Orbit, Portability, Quotidian, Rescension, Site, Tools, Ubiquity, Vector, Web, Xenophilly, Yarn, and Zone.

The concept of the digital commons is based on the potential for everything that is digital to be common to all. Like common grazing land, this can mean commonly owned, commonly accessed or commonly available. But all of these blurred positions of status and ownership have complex repercussions in the field of intellectual property and copyright. The commons has become synonymous with digital media through the discourse surrounding free and open source software and creative commons licensing. The digital commons is a response to the inherent ‘copy n paste’ reproducibility of digital data, and the cultural forms that they support. Instead of trying to restrict access, the digital commons invite open participation in the production of ideas and culture. Where culture is not something you buy, but something you do.

The embroidery is a slow reproduction of A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons text, transmitting the meme of the lexicon to hundreds of people stitching across the globe. In this way the work is a cultural meme, transmitting ideas through thinking and making as part of a distributed participatory project. The whole text is easy to take apart, divide into small sections, stitch, and reassemble through fabric and film. It is easy to translate into different formats, but hard to translate metaphor into different languages.

The poetic and metaphorical aspects of the digital commons are recontextualised through close-reading, close-listening, discussion and shared making. The ideas are most effectively explored when they are expressed and illustrated using and multiple layers of meaning and wit. The meme of the digital commons travels fast through networks that investigate the language of shared production and distribution, for example crafters and open source programmers are committed embroiderers of the digital commons. The meme of the digital commons has also spread across all areas of cultural production including music, design and art.

About the Artists

Ele Carpenter is a curator based in London. Her creative and curatorial practice investigates specific socio-political cultural contexts in collaboration with artists, makers, amateurs and experts. She is a lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Since 2005 Ele has facilitated the Open Source Embroidery project using embroidery and code as a tool to investigate the language and ethics of participatory production and distribution. The Open Source Embroidery exhibition (Furtherfield, 2008; BildMuseet Umeå Sweden, 2009; Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco, 2010) presented work by over 30 artists, including the finished Html Patchwork now on display at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Ele is currently facilitating the ‘Embroidered Digital Commons’ a distributed embroidery exploring collective work and ownership 2008 – 2013.

Emilie Giles is an alumnus of MA Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice at Goldsmiths College. Since graduating in 2010 her time has been spent co-organising MzTEK, a women’s technology and arts collective, as well as completing an internship with arts group Blast Theory and working for social video distributors Unruly. She is currently involved with TESTIMONIES, a project which explores oral history in relation to the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games largely through social media. Emilie’s own practice revolves around notions of pervasive gaming, married with urban exploration and psychogeography. Her most recent focus lies in taking fundamental gaming principles from Geocaching and exploring the consequences of adding an emotional dimension.

During the 2012 – 2013 academic year, Terminal will award four – $500 stipends to assist in the creation of new internet based art works. The submission deadline is February 15, 2012.

Terminal can provide webspace for completed projects, or the artists may elect to host the project themselves (with Terminal retaining a copy for archiving). We simply ask that Terminal be acknowledged with a link from the project.

This information may be included in the text of the e-mail or as an attachment

xtine burrough is a media artist and educator. She is the editor of Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (Routledge 2011) and co-author of Digital Foundations (New Riders/AIGA 2009).

Informed by the history of conceptual art, she uses social networking, databases, search engines, blogs, and applications in combination with popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, or Mechanical Turk, to create web communities promoting interpretation and autonomy.

xtine believes art shapes social experiences by mediating consumer culture with rebellious practices. As an associate professor of communication at CSUF, she bridges the gap between histories, theories, and production in design and new media education.

Stephanie Rothenberg creates provocative interactions that question the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. Through participatory performance, installation and networked media, her work investigates the mediation of the physical, analog body through the digital interfaces of commodity culture. Adopting the role of cultural anthropologist, the medium of the techno-sphere itself becomes a laboratory for raising critical questions about our interpersonal relationship to technology and its broader socio-political implications.

Stephanie has exhibited, performed and lectured in the US and internationally at venues including the Sundance Film Festival, MASS MoCA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Banff New Media Institute and LABoral Center for Art & Industry. She has received numerous awards including a 2011 Harpo and a 2009 Creative Capital in Emerging Fields. She has been in residence at art & technology centers such as Eyebeam, Harvestworks and free103point9 Wave Farm in upstate NY. In addition to her position as Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo, Stephanie is Artistic Co-Director of REV-, a non-profit organization based in New York City, that furthers socially-engaged art, design, and pedagogy.

Open Data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. Open Data recently, gaining popularity with the rise of the W3C Semantic Web prospective vision.

The LinkedData network, promoted by the W3C, is the most visible part of what an open Web of data, as a complement of a Web of document could be. Vast repositories of normalized data like those from DBPedia, PubMed, GeneID, DrugBank, OECD or UNESCO are now stimulating an intensive new field of research related to the possible uses of those data in IA and knowledge management applications. Major companies involved in data exploration and information retrieval invest in this new field and study new interfaces and algorithms to bring the gap between data and users like Google and the Public Data Explorer.

Governments are increasingly recognizing the benefits of making their data open and reusable. The launch of open-data government initiatives such as Data.gov in USA or various initiatives in Europe like the Open Data Challenge, or data.gov.uk is a strong encouragement to the development of the open data movement.

The wide availability of Public Sector Information can be a key driver to develop content markets in North America, which can generate new businesses and jobs and provide more information to consumers and citizens. In Canada, the Open Data Pilot is part of the Government commitment to open government, which is being pursued along three streams: open data, open information and open dialogue, and aims to drive innovation and economic opportunities for all Canadians.

We would like to invite researchers and actors of the open data movement to present their work to the workshop. This workshop would like to bring together data providers, initiative groups, technology providers, and researchers to facilitate the dissemination of ideas, methods and promote new research perspectives related to the Open Data and the Semantic Web applications.

Evaluation and metrics related to Open Data sets quality, processing and software performances

Open Data and translation

Open Data visualization

Demos and papers related to working application or systems under development will be encouraged. We hope to cover three main perspectives: government and administrations (e.g., open data shared with citizens), industry (e.g., marketing, software applications and services), and academic (e.g., theoretical research related to Open Data production and uses).

Important Dates

Paper submission: February 22, 2012

Notification of acceptance: March 30, 2012

Camera ready: April 27, 2012

Workshop: May 27, 2012

Submissions

Two formats are proposed:

Full paper submissions should be at most 8 pages in length, including references.

Demo paper submissions should be at most 4 pages in length, including references.

Submission of commercial applications and research related papers are strongly encouraged when they are strictly related to real open data (e.g., innovative commercial software tool using public data-sets).

Authors are invited to submit electronically on the website of the workshop by February 22th, 2012. All papers must be written in English and formatted in PDF according to Springer LNCS style. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX2e style available from Springer.

The US Congress is about to pass an internet censorship bill written by the copyright and corporate music and film lobbies, claiming that this bill is written in your name to “protect creativity.” The law would allow the government or corporations to censor entire sites — they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

In fact, PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are backed and largely written by the Hollywood film industry, namely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is trying to sell goods and ideas that are already free. Similar to its most well-known President, Jack Valenti, who represented Hollywood interests in Washington, and vice-versa, the current chairman and CEO of the MPAA is Chris Dodd, a prominent member of the Democratic Party and US Senator from Connecticut for 30 years.

Artists, musicians, actors, writers, and media-makers need to sign. Your statement is powerful because the corporate music and film lobbies push these laws to censor the internet in your name.

In solidarity, Turbulence.org will feature a block out page from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST today, January 18.

INTERNET GOES ON STRIKE: ALL SITES AND PEOPLE TO GO OUT

Major sites all over the internet have gone on strike due to SOPA and PIPA, the hot-button anti-piracy legislation. Experts expect strike to last 150 seconds, and agree this is a “near eternity” in internet time.

Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. The Senate is scheduled to vote on its version of the internet censorship bill on Tuesday, January 24th, and unless there are 41 senators to voice their opposition to allowing the bill to proceed, it is expected to pass.

Legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader. It would empower governments and corporations to take down virtually any website, create new liabilities and uncertainties for web innovators, and make the web less safe. According to the varied and multitudinous reasons large numbers of sites and individuals are opposed to the bill, it betrays basic American tenets, such as free speech, prosperity, and national security. On top of all that, cybersecurity experts say it wouldn’t stop copyright infringement.

The legislation is backed and largely written by the MPAA, as they have said in media reports. They have also spent millions in lobbying dollars to pass this legislation.

Takes down hosts of content and legitimate free speech. The legislation is overly broad and could block some of our favorite websites to Americans only over just one claim to an infringing link posted by users.

The Economy

Creates massive new legal uncertainties and liabilities for web startups, stifling job creation in our most vibrant sector. As 54 leading tech venture capitalists wrote to Congress, the censorship bills would, “stifle investments in internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness.”

Security / Privacy

A web security initiative that has been in development for more than a decade and is just beginning to be implemented, DNSSEC, would be illegal under the bill. The DNS filtering and anti-circumvention provisions in the bill would force a huge step backwards for securing critical national infrastructure from cyberattacks, preventing online identity theft, and stopping the spread of malware.

Copyright Infringement

People that want to share copyrighted content online would still be able to. To get around DNS blocking, all you have to do is enter the IP address of a website into your browser’s url bar.

CEO’s of Huffington Post, Google, Twitter, and thousands and thousands more. To see a full list, go here.

SOPA becoming election liability for backers

To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government—and raise campaign cash while they’re at it.

Among the fattest targets: SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and two of its most vocal co-sponsors, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has also felt the wrath of SOPA opponents.

Even GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were asked by voters recently to weigh in on the bill (neither gave definitive answers, though activists have interpreted Santorum’s response as more sympathetic to SOPA than Romney’s).

KEY POINTS ABOUT SOPA / PIPA

1. Leading constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe and internet law expert Marvin Ammori have argued that the bill violates the First Amendment because they would restrict considerable speech by people who are not engaging in infringement, either directly or indirectly.

2. 54 leading internet venture capitalists have signed a letter stating that legal uncertainties under PROTECT-IP would “stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness.”

3. Contrary to its supporters’ claims, the bill will affect domestic websites. Any site that can be shown to enable circumvention of website blocking under the bill would face penalties. This could include sites where users have posted links to IP addresses or new domains for sites that have been blocked.

4. The bill would use DNS filtering to block sites, which is the same technique used for web censorship in China and Iran. The U.S. will no longer have a moral high ground when talking about protecting internet freedom globally.

5. An internet security initiative that has been in the works for more than a decade and is just starting to be implement, DNSSEC, would be considered an illegal circumvention tool under the bill. The DNS filtering and anti-circumvention provisions in the bill would force a huge step backwards for securing critical infrastructure, preventing identity theft, and stopping malware.

6. The bill has not received sufficient committee work and is not ready for floor action. The bill did not receive a single hearing and the mark-up session held by the Judiciary Committee on May 26th lasted less than 8 minutes and featured no amendments and no substantial debate.

The Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012, will coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics in London, and Watermans is pleased to host a Festival of ground-breaking installations exploring interactivity and participation in New Media and Digital Art. This year long project is showcasing the work of six international artists and collectives and initiates discussions around the impact of technology in art as well as the meaning, possibilities and issues around human interaction and engagement inviting responses from artists, academics, students, art professionals and the public. The project will include a series of seminars in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London and a publication with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

This issue explores the role interactivity and participation, as well as light art and new media approaches to the public space as tool that may foster engagement and shared forms of participation.

Contemporary art is pursuing technological modes of interaction and display that provide the audience with media rich experiences. But are these forms of interaction, interpassive pre-ordained engagements or new technologically based forms of entertainment? Or is art redefining further its relationship with the audience – following and pushing forward the experiential examples of Christo and Spencer Tunick through the aid of technology?

This special issue of LEA wishes to analyze the relationship between these different aspects that contribute to the complexity – conceptual, technological and aesthetic – of interactive installation in public space, creating the ground-breaking and complex phenomena that characterize the aesthetics and visuality of contemporary technocultures.

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals for an issue on these or related themes with Senior Editors Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and LEA Editor in Chief) and Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths College). The issue guest editors are Irini Papadimitriou and Jonathan Munro.

New Media academics, theoreticians, curators, art historians and artists that are interested in any combination of the above themes are particularly welcome to submit proposals for consideration.

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) will produce an online and printed issue, as well as host curated images and videos online.
Proposals to: info@leoalmanac.org

a) Subject heading: Touch and Go
b) 500 hundred word abstract for articles – submission of full articles preferred for this special issue by proposal deadline February 12, 2012
c) Deadline for submission of full article: March 15, 2012
d) 2 images at 72 dpi resolution no larger than 700pixels width for artists
e) Links to previous work, videos or personal sites

Our publication formats allow for full-color throughout and we encourage rich pictorial content where relevant and possible. Note however that all material submitted must be copyright cleared (or due diligence must be evidenced). For online publication a wide variety of media content may be considered (animation, mp3, flash, java, etc…)

For scholarly papers please submit the final paper ready for peer review. Your contribution will be reviewed by at least two members of the LEA board and revisions may be requested subject to review.

For themed and pictorial essays please submit an abstract or outline for editorial consideration and further discussion.

Please keep your news, announcements and hyperlinks brief and focused – include contact details and a link to an external site where relevant. We reserve the right to sub-edit your submissions in order to comply with LEA policies and formats. Where material is time-sensitive please include both embargo and expiry dates.

In all cases specify special system considerations where these are necessary (platform, codecs, plug-ins, etc…)